SOMEWHERE IN PORTLAND, Sara Siestreem places culturally significant items on a Xerox machine—buttons, oyster shells from Coos Bay and baskets she has woven, often adding her own hands to the composition—and presses the copy button. More than art emerges from the black-and-white print. Siestreem has lived most of her life in Portland, but she spent her early years living in the territory of her Hanis Coos ancestors in the Umpqua River Valley. As an artist and an activist, her multicultural background finds fruition in her multidisciplinary approach.
Siestreem’s latest public art piece, night flyers, a commission for the Vernier Science Center at Portland State University, references this interconnection. With migration as the central theme, revealed through the basket pattern for geese, Siestreem alludes to the patterns and rhythms of animals, people and life in general.
The Xeroxed oyster shells and buttons evoke histories of genocide against the Coos and other Indigenous peoples, and against Mother Nature. Siestreem found the shells at the edge of village sites in the Coos Bay estuary, where ancient oyster beds grew until colonization arrived. Working with these and other elements, and adding paint, water, and pencil, Siestreem combines natural materials with her own energy in an idiosyncratic process that pries open difficult and intertwined themes of social and ecological justice. Her work honors the fundamental interdependence and equality between people, plants, elements, animals and the cosmos.
