Mystery Pond

Exhibition Statement

Mystery Pond is about yearning for connectivity in an era when our survival depends on it. It is a response to months of quarantine and the need to mediate many of our relationships through screens, while also experiencing a growing awareness that we are deeply and physically connected to this world in all its failings.

Mystery Pond regards the viewer from a nebulous, mental place, inspired by nature but distinct from it. It is intended as a kind of reflecting pool, a chance for meditation with your eyes open. Mystery Pond is about yearning for a connection to the Earth, to deep time, to the mystery of being, and ultimately to each other.

Amelia Garretson-Persans + Ian P. Hundt

Amelia Garretson-Persans and Ian P. Hundt have been collaborating on site specific installations, videos, and music projects for nearly two decades. In 2015 they created a multi-media installation with live video projection for Magnaball, a 3-day Phish festival, which received over 30,000 visitors and mostly didn’t break. They currently comprise two thirds of the synth pop group, Floaty Floaty, and have recently begun pre-production on Amelia’s feature length psychedelic art film set in a hospital about a mother trying to save her ailing son.

More about Amelia Garretson-Persans

“I work in a variety of narrative forms including writing, filmmaking and installation. I play with genre to write stories with secret undercurrents. I write about writers who sometimes find themselves trapped by what they’ve written. My work is deeply feminine – I honor emotional logic and uncertainty.  In my work, buildings and landscapes have their own forms of consciousness.”

Amelia Garretson-Persans has been making books, films, animations, music videos and installations for over 10 years. Notable projects include Notes from the 422nd Annual Wraiths for Writing Conference, a series of ghost stories and eerie animations she was invited to produce for the Nashville Scene’s arts blog, Country Life; The Sect of the Blue Goose, a novel told via text messages from a ghost that she began developing at the Banff Centre’s Digital Narratives residency; and A Tincture of Time, a feature-length psychedelic art film, chronicling her experiences in the hospital with her firstborn child who has a rare genetic condition, currently in pre-production.

In her role as a program administrator at Bomb Diggity Arts, an art and film studio that supports adults with disabilities to realize their artistic goals, she has helped to develop a variety of public art shows and events in the Portland community, including Variety Show at SPACE Gallery and the Watch This! Film Festival at the Portland House of Music and Events.

Garretson-Persans is also the creator of the In Her Kitcheninternational recipe video series, a public engagement class that runs at the Maine College of Art. In Her Kitchen partners MECA students with chefs from the immigrant advocacy group for women, In Her Presence, to create recipe videos.

She lives and works in Southern Maine with her husband and frequent collaborator, Ian P. Hundt, and her two small children, Paul and Lily.

More about Ian P. Hundt

Ian P. Hundt is a musician, producer, sound engineer, and performance artist. He has created original music and sound design for a number of animations and films, including many of Garretson-Persans’s projects. He operates The Middle Ear Production House out of his basement in South Portland and has worked as a live sound engineer at many of Portland’s music venues. He is currently at work on a multi-media performance project featuring Superblaster, a character created and performed by Ian.