After the River House is a collaboration between Jade Hoyer and the poet, Katie Byrum. Displayed at WHAT Art Gallery in St. Croix Falls, WI, a former bank, this body of work and its sister project, Valued, explore our investment (emotional and financial) in the idea of home. After the River House, displayed in the bank's vault, connects wheatpaste homes and turf grass lawns with paper bearing the text of Byrum's poem "Recurring Dream: To the River House" as a means of illustrating the artists’ shared experiences of leaving their hometowns.
After the River House
2023
Silkscreen, wheatpaste, turf grass, receipt paper, gold foil
[displayed at WHAT Art Gallery, St. Croix Falls, WI]
To The River House
recurring dream
by Katie Byrum
It happened every night in pieces: you left me
talismans from the other side, dreamthings
with a sideways-sense that blurred
when I went to back away. You were tethered in place,
sunk in the mud near a threadbare bench,
your tired eaves, your yellow face whose windows
watched the river slap at the banks when the boats went by.
I was driving away from you, my eye
on the rearview. I watched your trees recede
into a green hum, your yellow behind me and behind me
till something gave like floodwater:
a long thread unraveling.
A feeling in the hands
like braiding hair.
Now I look at my life
with a seasonal madness,
frantic at what I left behind:
banana plants with brown edges
that curled like hair, old photographs
we pulled from the wall. Those white squares
where the frames had been.