Fragments, 2022
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The art piece “Fragments” is about prioritizing the collective us, where a safe space is created for students to imagine, to create and manifest their ideas without any fear. A space where their voices matter and have the potential to transform communities through art-making and where they learn, through collaboration, how to coexist respectfully and peacefully.
As the resident artist at the Missoula Art Museum (MAM), I designed a summer program where high school students could learn about contemporary art by visiting shows at the MAM and engage in public art making to beautify the place we live.
This year’s project was driven by the students’ visual responses to the question: What connects all of us to a shared sense of place? When I refer to a shared sense of place I mean the places where meanings are made. Perhaps for some of us it could refer to memories of a place where meals were made, a space where you woke up without fear for the first time, a moment of painful silence, a family migration event, a new home, the loss of a beloved one, or the smell of lavender growing. We explored all the shared experiences that make us humans and give us the opportunity to empathize with one another.
This finished specific public art piece is composed of three elements: The VOICE of our youth, their MEMORIES of place, and the pedestrians showing us the passage of time.
VOICE is carried by a collaborative poem made by fourteen student participants from the Museum’s Teens Art Project (TAP) and University of Montana’s TRIO-Upward Bound. The piece, “Surrounded by Mountains,” can be heard using the QR code in the piece. The poem joins fragments from 14 individual poems to suggest their shared sense of place.
MEMORIES are the photos taken by the TAP teens addressing their sense of belonging.
TIME is made visible in the impermanence of the piece, where not only the weather, but pedestrians alter its appearance as they walk on it.
— Janaina Vieira-Marques
As the resident artist at the Missoula Art Museum (MAM), I designed a summer program where high school students could learn about contemporary art by visiting shows at the MAM and engage in public art making to beautify the place we live.
This year’s project was driven by the students’ visual responses to the question: What connects all of us to a shared sense of place? When I refer to a shared sense of place I mean the places where meanings are made. Perhaps for some of us it could refer to memories of a place where meals were made, a space where you woke up without fear for the first time, a moment of painful silence, a family migration event, a new home, the loss of a beloved one, or the smell of lavender growing. We explored all the shared experiences that make us humans and give us the opportunity to empathize with one another.
This finished specific public art piece is composed of three elements: The VOICE of our youth, their MEMORIES of place, and the pedestrians showing us the passage of time.
VOICE is carried by a collaborative poem made by fourteen student participants from the Museum’s Teens Art Project (TAP) and University of Montana’s TRIO-Upward Bound. The piece, “Surrounded by Mountains,” can be heard using the QR code in the piece. The poem joins fragments from 14 individual poems to suggest their shared sense of place.
MEMORIES are the photos taken by the TAP teens addressing their sense of belonging.
TIME is made visible in the impermanence of the piece, where not only the weather, but pedestrians alter its appearance as they walk on it.
— Janaina Vieira-Marques
On my way to America, 2015
1st - Innocence
2nd - Fire works
3rd – Walking on pieces
In a small dance studio space two wooden children's chairs are back to back, each holding a plastic gun and a white rose. Gingerbread cookies surround the chairs covering all the possible spaces to walk. The audience is seated around the space in an unconventional manner, disrupting the space between spectator and performer.
After a glimpse of the objects and space, and in reaction to three distinct sound layers played loudly to fill the space, professional dancer Laurel
Sears creates an improvisational performance shaped entirely by the unpredictability of this audio/visual encounter. The piece is designed to create a dialogue between the audience, the setting, and her movement, as she guides us through Innocence, the Event and the Emotion left behind afterwards.
Ms. Marques's deliberated and disciplined work ethic results in a tightly conceptualized body of work that requires contemplation and often participation. “I want to create an intimate space for reflection but also a place for conscious and unconscious participation” says the artist. “With this new pieces I found myself trying to justify the paradox of beauty and ugliness that we Americans face everyday.
Here is the Missoulian article, by Cory Walsh.
The Bus Tour 2014
The “Bus Tour”, August 2014, was a site-specific dance performance created through collaboration between choreographer and director
Amy Ragsdale and visual artist Janaína Vieira-Marques.
A bus with 45 people on board headed north on highway 200 to three locations along the Blackfoot River in Missoula, MT. The dance performance included six professional dancers from Headwaters Dance Company and also 20 community dancers. Along the way to each location,
the audience saw three dances choreographed by Ms. Ragsdale and assembled visually by Ms. Vieira-Marques, speaking to the beautiful
and complex landscape in juxtaposition with features of an economically depressed community in Montana. Passengers were also surprised by
unexpected performances, snapshots, seen out the windows along the way while a humorous narrator inside the bus presented some historic
facts about those places.
The locations for the dance performances included an old mill warehouse in Bonner, a Ponderosa Pine forest and an abandoned road cut through rocks on the side of the river.
Amy Ragsdale and visual artist Janaína Vieira-Marques.
A bus with 45 people on board headed north on highway 200 to three locations along the Blackfoot River in Missoula, MT. The dance performance included six professional dancers from Headwaters Dance Company and also 20 community dancers. Along the way to each location,
the audience saw three dances choreographed by Ms. Ragsdale and assembled visually by Ms. Vieira-Marques, speaking to the beautiful
and complex landscape in juxtaposition with features of an economically depressed community in Montana. Passengers were also surprised by
unexpected performances, snapshots, seen out the windows along the way while a humorous narrator inside the bus presented some historic
facts about those places.
The locations for the dance performances included an old mill warehouse in Bonner, a Ponderosa Pine forest and an abandoned road cut through rocks on the side of the river.
