Sarah Falkner
Sarah Falkner is a writer and transdisciplinary artist with a particular focus on occurrent arts practices.She is both a NY-state licensed and traditionally-apprenticed and -initiated healthcare practitioner. Her first novel Animal Sanctuary was selected by Stacey Levine for the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2011, and that same year she was a MacDowell fellow in residence; "Animal Sanctuary" inspired a work in collaboration with artist Ryder Cooley, the performance cycle REWILDERMENT: ITS THEORY AND PRACTICE, including "animal disasters/animal sanctuaries," a 25-minute multimedia performance with music, spoken word & video projections. She has exhibited, performed, organized, practiced, and been published primarily in the Northeastern United States. Her contributions to the recent Hudson, NY exhibition Orb of Influence were installations of objects arising from private and social practice and having multivalent devotional, healing, activist, and poetic purposes.
Falkner also co-authored "City of Salt,"(Aperture: 2005), a collaborative work with artists Kahn and Selesnick and writer Erez Lieberman. In Hudson, NY Falkner co-founded the (hi)story labor(atory) experimental collaborative arts space and co-curated its 2010-11 season of exhibitions and performances, co-founded the Hudson Wellness Collective in 2012, and currently co-hosts the monthly show "Roots, Runners, Rhizomes: Health & Healing from the Underground" on Columbia-Greene counties' community radio station, WGXC.org
More information and documentation can be found at www.sarahfalkner.com
The Booklist review for Animal Sanctuary said:
"In a stealthily affecting reportorial voice, debut novelist Falkner tells the story of tepidly successful 1960s movie actress Kitty Dawson via interviews, critiques, press coverage, and plot summaries of her movies (one involves packs of rampaging dogs, another giant mutant rabbits). Kitty's intensifying affinity for animals inspires her and her husband to open a California sanctuary for abused and neglected "exotic big cats." We're also granted glimpses into the lives of Kitty's body double, a college student searching for a missing friend while on location in Africa; director Albert Wickwood, a clever and cutting variation of Alfred Hitchcock; and Kitty's son, Rory, a spiritually oriented performance artist. Other pieces in this brilliantly analytical, ironically funny, and tenderly empathic scrapbook novel illuminate curious parallels between hunting and filmmaking, the ethics of nature documentaries, the suffering of lab animals, discrimination against immigrants, the commercialization of art, and how movies "function in place of fairy tales and myths to shape what you fear and hope for." Stylistically fresh, culturally lush, intellectually exciting, and elegantly emotional, Falkner's provocative, surreptitiously beautiful novel dissolves the boundaries between animals and humankind, racial and ethnic groups, and men and women and reminds us that we can all "give and receive and be sanctuary." -- Donna Seaman
