“The map is not the territory.” - Alfred Korzybski

II’m an interdisciplinary and community artist mapping what it means to be human, exploring how we can both be fully ourselves and also find the belonging and connection in the world that we all deserve.

Through a multi-layered, participatory research process, and a range of forms including photography, oral history, video, and interactive installations, I invite people to join me in questioning the maps we’re given that tell us how to live or how things should be. 

I want to see what happens when we’re willing to make ourselves vulnerable together, to say out loud when those maps are inaccurate and don’t line up. What can we create if we take the risk to stop hiding, to start playing, to chart the terrain of who we really are and how we feel?

Whether the prescribed guides are about motherhood, grief, pleasure, or success, I transform and abstract everyday objects, texts, and stories to discover new perspectives of the landscapes of our lives as they change and grow. Over 20 plus years, I’ve been creating an atlas of projects that reflect the magnificent variety and messy complexities of being human. 

With other disoriented new mothers, I repurposed guilt-inducing parenting manuals into found poetry and paper baby clothing. After my friend’s young son died, I surveyed dozens of lived topographies of loss, creating abstract photographic landscapes that reflect a wider range of travel through grief than many people know. Frustrated by the shrinking boundaries of childhood play, I invited kids to build a playground out of wood, rope, and fabric photographs of their parents’ outdoor play memories. I shot an erotic short film by recording temperature instead of light, to see if it could reveal the beauty of pleasure in sex in contrast to the shame so many of us are taught to feel.

Mapping our lives by taking the familiar and making it strange helps us perceive the world and ourselves differently, creating space for new questions, unexpected conversations, and community.

There is beauty in being seen–in making art that reveals and celebrates the contours of each of our unique territories, that ultimately can help us to navigate our way towards more meaningful, connected lives.

If you feel the same way, join my community by adding yourself to my mailing list below. I send out occasional news about my evolving practice and opportunities to participate in projects—right now, this is the best place to get updates, as I’m moving away from sharing my work on social media. After you do, feel free to reach out to connect. I look forward to meeting you.

xo,

Bio:

Mindy Stricke is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher mapping vulnerability, authenticity, and belonging. Her work has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts and has been exhibited and screened around the world. She has been featured in CBC Arts, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Japan’s Voce Magazine, Toronto Star, Modern Loss, What’s Your Grief, and the Smithsonian Institute of Photography book and exhibit, “Click! Photography Changes Everything.” A transplanted New Yorker now living in Canada, she is an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University.