2022 Forge Project Fellow Laura Ortman at Time & Space Limited

Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) will perform at Time & Space Limited in Hudson Thursday, August 4, at 7 PM. The event will begin with a screening of My Soul Remainer, a video that premiered at the 2017 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and was part of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and made in collaboration with filmmaker and director Nanobah Becker (Diné) and acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer Jock Soto (Diné).

Ortman is known for her live performances that fuse sound and visual art, using improvisation and loops to create singular atmospheres in a given space. For a special set in Hudson at TSL, she will generate sonic resonances inspired by her peers and collaborators in experimental music, including Michael Evans and the late Tony Conrad, as well as recent travels to the waters and lands of Cassis, France, and Bozeman, Montana. In Ortman’s practice, music becomes a cipher for these resonances—both to people and places.

In speaking about her collaborative video, My Soul Remainer, she says, “There are things I didn’t know how to express, except for in pure sound.”

About Laura Ortman

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, and as part of the trio, In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings.

Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, The Stone residency, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast.

Ortman is the recipient of the 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About Time & Space Limited

Time & Space Limited, a not-for-profit arts organization serving the City of Hudson and the Hudson River Valley Region, invites individuals and families to participate in the arts in a culturally rich and socially-active environment.

TSL encourages artistic expression in daily life, and supports the evolution of Hudson, New York, as a community that celebrates its diversity. TSL accomplishes its goals by engaging audiences in exploring themes that reflect the local and global concerns of Hudson Valley residents with original theater productions and performances, music, art exhibitions, multi-media productions, independent and documentary films, Live HD Simulcasts, youth projects, and special events.

By exposing an underserved area of New York State to the benefits of artistic expression, TSL has become a beacon and leader in the neighborhood, county, and state, shaping the lives of community members through innovative and exciting cultural projects of quality and substance. Its mission is to educate, enliven, and expand the artistic quality of life in the community it serves.

About Forge Project

Forge Project is a Native-led initiative centered on Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice. Located on the unceded homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in Upstate New York, Forge Project works to upend political and social systems formed through generations of settler colonialism.

Launched in 2021, Forge Project serves the social and cultural landscape of shared communities through a funded fellowship program for Indigenous culture workers, including those working in food and land justice, law and decolonial governance, and art. Forge hosts Native-led public education and events, a lending art collection focused on contemporary art by Indigenous artists, and a teaching farm and related programs developed in partnership with Sky High Farm.

Images courtesy Alekz Pacheco.