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.