Natasha Woods - Emerging Artist

Now in its seventeenth cycle, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program creates—through a jurying process and culminating exhibition—an opportunity to promote local artistic production to a national audience. The 2019 Fellows were chosen from a field of 159 applicants by a panel of three jurors. The Nohl Fellowship program is administered in collaboration with the Lynden. Learn more about the program here.

About the Artist

Natasha Woods was born in New Hampton, Iowa, and is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2018. Her work has screened in various spaces including the Athens International Film Festival, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Milwaukee Film, and ULTRAcinema. Her film, Confrontations, is currently on tour with Sequence01, a radical moving image microcinema series curated by No Evil Eye (Ohio). In addition to screenings, Woods has shown work at Gluon Gallery and curated exhibitions at local galleries Real Tinsel and Facilitating Situations.
Artist's website

Catharsis Archives: On Natasha Woods

I sat down to write this essay on Milwaukee-based filmmaker Natasha Woods in mid-March, a few weeks after the COVID pandemic lockdown. Those early weeks adjusting to chronic at-home life were spent processing with friends, their tiny tiled faces stacked on the right side of the screen, and watching, pausing, and freewriting in response to recent films by Woods. I was watching Confrontations (2018), Woods’s short film about her multi-generational upbringing in rural Iowa, and though this was part of my assignment for this essay, the process of writing about Natasha became a healing activity: recalling aspects of our friendship and attempting to cultivate our relationship from a distance. I was sitting in California, looking back at the Midwest—and its lineage of experimental film—through the rearview mirror.

I met Natasha through the film community in Milwaukee. I recall an evening in the deep winter of January 2019. In a city that, pre-COVID, prioritized group hangs, Natasha and I always found time for one-on-one debriefs. That evening, we sat, as we typically did, at opposite ends of my couch, our bodies half-turned to look out the window, one hand holding a cup of wine, a bottle split between us. Our conversation rapidly scaled personal musings to film criticism. After we had our time, we bundled up in layers to shield our bodies from the wind as we ran down Fratney Street to watch ‘Rameau's Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1972–74), Michael Snow’s four-hour epic, at Microlights, a local microcinema. Moments like this, usually centered around watching and processing, scaffolded our friendship.

Woods had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee when a mutual friend who knew of my interest in personal ephemera introduced me to her work. Natasha was going through her family’s archival materials, specifically a box of letters and photographs she found on her grandmother Maria’s bedside table. The letters, written in Portuguese, are employed in Confrontations to patch together the story of Maria’s emigration from Recife, Brazil to Fredericksburg, Iowa, in the 1960s. Maria went about this move with the help of her sister-in-law Millie. She arrived in Iowa alone but continued to maintain a relationship with her estranged husband by writing letters. These documents form the narration of Confrontations, and the inflections Woods gives to particular phrases in Maria’s letters suggest that, over the years, the relationship was held close by Woods’s grandfather but perhaps brushed aside by her grandmother. By leaving Brazil, Maria was choosing to start over.

My first reaction to seeing Confrontations was a sense of generational feminist agency, told through the archival materials I’d learned about and against the backdrop of the local manufacturing industry in Fredericksburg. Woods began producing Confrontations just before her grandmother’s passing, making the film a cathartic return to her family’s past and a means to achieve needed closure. Structures of intuition, familial personalities, and the decisions Woods makes are thoroughly foregrounded in Confrontations.

Similar themes emerge In Woods’s current work on chuckwagon racing in the Midwest. Woods anchors this history in her own navigation of personal placemaking and draws a material parallel by turning to moving image installation for its presentation. By utilizing chuckwagon racing as an object in this project, Woods grapples with Iowa’s—and her family’s—colonialist histories. Today, chuckwagon racing survives as historical reenactment—a way to honor the past; for Woods, it represents an opening to a critical understanding of regional and familial tradition.

Yet, even when the memory is blurred or perhaps painful, Woods approaches the narrative arc with full transparency, a form of transparency that is committed to the care she brings to her friendships and the institutions she shows up to every day. Woods's work bears witness to the autobiographical against the backdrop of family history, told through—like our friendship now—a distance.

Julie Niemi (b. 1988, Fayetteville, Arkansas, raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an independent curator, writer, and editor based in Los Angeles. Through research, design, writing, and exhibition making, her projects grapple with counter-histories in the United States.

I often imagine a list of events that have formed me, as if by naming the memories from my childhood I could create a better understanding of myself. Chuckwagon racing has served as one of those memories, a memory I often come back to when I’d find myself explaining what it was like growing up in rural Iowa. I’d begin by trying to explain about the pageantry and camaraderie that I witnessed, the matching shirts, covered wagons, outriders, the smoking stove, the tent-poles, and the barrels perfectly distanced for each wagon to complete a figure-8 right before they hit a sprint around the bend. I never knew why or what these represented, but I knew I was drawn to pageantry and rituals that chuckwagon racing encompassed. In these moments, I can’t shake the question of who I might have been if I had never left, and what responsibilities I have now because I did.

Each summer, I would spend weeks babysitting my cousins on my aunt’s farm. I would help them with chores, ride horses, swing from the haylofts, visit the old cemetery up the road on the old four-wheeler. Even though, as a “city girl,” I felt like I was a tourist myself, I truly enjoyed the solitude and freedom the country offered me, away from some combination of my five siblings.

We had moved from the small factory towns that I knew so well to “the city” (Cedar Falls, population 41,000) when I was 12. The impetus for this move came from my mother, who would later become the first in our family to get a bachelor's degree. This wasn’t the first time she had strayed from the path of her family’s expectations and ideals, which she described as being “to be seen but not heard.” In a way, it’s because of her rebellious spirit that my sister and I were born, eleven months apart, when she was only nineteen, to my mother and my father, an immigrant from Brazil, also a factory worker. I am the youngest of his five kids, born within a five year period. I have no memories of my parents ever being together.

It was the announcement of this move that introduced me to the idea that my relatives and neighbors judged country life superior to city life. Cities are where crime happens, where people who have different values, different ways of life, and different colored skin live--and often when my relatives said “different” it was a stand-in for “bad.” Our move was the talk of the town. I was terrified by what I had been hearing from my extended family, and I was angry with my mom for making us do it. I pleaded with her to drive the hour each day to class so we could stay put. My father was the only person who expressed that this was a good opportunity, although it complicated our bi-weekly visits. Despite my efforts, at the end of the summer we loaded up my grandpa’s horse trailer and moved to Cedar Falls.

When we returned for holidays and weddings, my family would ask me about the “big city” or claim we were “big-city girls” now. But my sister and I would still join in the family photos, our dark hair and tanned skin sticking out in the sea of pale skin folks in cowboy boots. I began to wonder how we fit into all of this, or if we did. I began to question the roots of my relatives’ values and their concerns about a different way of life. The exact thing that they had warned me about—difference--became central to my growth and my understanding of the world and the systems that continue to oppress people who were unlike them.

It became clearer that I was not like them despite the things we shared in common. It was another chapter in the bifurcation of my life: between mom’s house and dad’s weekends, my sister and my half-siblings, city, and country, white but also Brazillian, academia and manual labor. I was taught to believe that these identities could rarely be joined together. But that was part of the reason I wanted to return nearly 20 years later to make a movie about chuckwagon racing. I am still trying to figure it out.

Back in rural Iowa to shoot, moments accumulated, like when my grandma’s brother, Beaver, snuck me into the crow’s nest to witness the last championship race. A moment, I will admit, so exhilarating that I forgot to turn on my camera. This is to say that there are a lot of moments left out of this piece, moments that I am still trying to process, moments yet to come. Throughout the filming, Iurked cautiously along the sidelines, pretending that I was supposed to be there, trying to make sense of it all.

Chuckwagon racing is a dying sport. I was documenting the deterioration of a spectacle that refused to save itself because of its reluctance to change. (At the same time, too much change: young cowboys are not becoming cowboys anymore, they are buying boats and snowmobiles instead.) Chuckwagon racers claimed that there weren't enough riders and wagons to keep it going, but I believe if they had been willing to integrate the powderpuff wagons (the wagons run by women) into the main races, they would have had the critical mass to continue. Perhaps that’s the point: the inability to change results in destruction.

At the racecourse, there were moments of obvious connection and a sense of belonging as well as moments of uncertainty. The two screens in the installation mirror this dichotomy. One shows a moving image that I have no control over—it comes from a camera placed on the body of a chuckwagon racer--an image that invites us to look into a world we would not otherwise see. Sensory-driven, it represents the insider. The other video was created by a body behind two cameras--mimicking ethnographic filmmaking techniques--with durational long shots and an observational approach. This represents the outsider. This duality felt true to my relationship to the subject: insider and outsider. While I tried to document the races, and my experiences within them, fairly and objectively, we know that is not possible.

Filmmaking is a space where I can explore these ideas and memories, where I can test them out, open up a conversation with my past. It is a way to discuss my upbringing with those who knew me then, and those who know me now. The installation was designed to offer multiple perspectives and opportunities to think critically about the material. I wanted to encourage you, as a viewer, to come up with your own ideas, not only about the tradition of chuckwagon racing, but also about your relationship to the traditions that you know and practice. Now I’ve given you all of the notes, sketches, and thoughts that went into the installation, which has yet to be realized due to the pandemic. I hope by sharing my process, you will be able to take something away from the virtual experience.