“Since completing an 18-year art project in Maine’s mills, Amy Stacey Curtis has been tackling a new ambitious project, battling a severe neurological illness and disability possibly caused by untreated Lyme Disease. When another neurologist tried to determine if she’s schizophrenic, he asked if she thinks she’s a super hero, three times. She didn’t tell him about the cape she wears to give her strength. He wouldn’t get it. It flows behind her, long and purple, with a gold and red butterfly, sequins and rhinestones…” - Amy Stacey Curtis
This is the bio Amy offered as her introduction before she presented at a PechaKucha Portland Event last year. And as the emcee I was flustered and honored, with my heart pounding, to introduce her. Here is an artist I have exceedingly high respect for. An artist who doesn't create things so much as experiences for her viewers. She creates for us opportunities for discovery, insight, perspective....sometimes exalted, insightful, occasionally painful and often humorous. Anyone here ever try and erase those un-erasable letter outlines in her MEMORY show? As a participant I was offered an embodied experience that some things, like memories, never erase completely away no matter how hard I rub with one of those gum erasers she provided us?
She offers with her blocks and balls and outlines and graduated cylinders a powerful platform for startling metaphor. Her work offers the extraordinary gift of our experience as a living, breathing aspect to her work.
Always moved by her articulate, keen, mathematical precision she has also showed a level of heart that is equal to her talent as she has wrestled with illness. Many talents may be crushed by less dire medical/health circumstances than what Amy has faced. Her journey of the last few years, for those at all familiar, has been a journey of deep penetrating terror and bewildering debilitation. And for someone to emerge from that cocoon spun of suicidal prompts into the light of day into her beloved mill, expressing gratitude for all that have supported her on her way ( and there have been many) ARE her wings.
Showing up at the mill I was moved not only by Amy's devotion to that space but by the level of attention,bordering on devotion as well, of her friends and volunteers. They dearly love Amy as an artist. As a person. And it is mutual.
Amy Stacey Curtis, my superhero, who offers the 100' yardage of her cape as a garment to provide each one of us with the same comfort now.
http://www.theartistplan.com/colossal-cape-collaboration