This upcoming Friday Sept 19th 7pm, I will be presenting a film screening and discussion of SKY WOMAN WOMEN (2024), a film which I worked on as part of the research, production, and filming, hosted by the Philosophy Film Club. It is my absolute pleasure to invite you to the screening. 

Sky Woman is a role model, a guide for how to not only deal with the unknown but move through fear and uncertainty toward gratitude and creativity.

The undamming of this indigenous river of knowledge allows the wisdom to flow freely, teaching us how to interact with the natural world.

About the Film

The “Sky Woman Women” project holds space for eighteen women storytellers from Mohawk, Seneca and Tuscarora tribal affiliations (enrolled, unenrolled, and not enrolled), telling and retelling the story of Sky Woman to each other. 

The Sky Woman creation story is about a pregnant woman falling through a hole in the sky, who, with courage and gratitude, creates a whole world from a handful of dirt. The story acts as a guide from a woman’s perspective in dealing with the natural world and maintaining balance within it, by acknowledging our kinship, inter-dependence and co-creation with the plants and animals that sustain us.

The telling of this Haudenosaunee creation story is an oral tradition primarily told by men. One aspect that is unique to this project is that our filmed conversation holds space for a multi-generational collective of women between the ages of 8 and 80.

Throughout the course of the film, we become aware that learning and change at an individual and societal level begins with people coming together and talking, as happens in an oral tradition.

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With assistance from 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grant in partnership with New York Foundation for the Arts

About the Artist

Dara Friedman is a German born artist and filmmaker working in Miami and New York City. She uses everyday sights and sounds as the raw material for film and video artworks that reverberate with emotional energy. With a background in structural film and dance, Friedman’s cinema calls for a radical reduction of the medium to its most essential material properties. In place of linear storylines, her films typically portray straightforward actions and situations that unfold according to predetermined rules and guidelines.

Yet for all of Friedman’s strenuous logic and discipline, her approach remains unabashedly sensual and emotive. Bearing rich imagery and a strong emphasis on bodily experience, her films generate moments of high-pitched, cathartic intensity as well as serene, even euphoric interludes. Friedman’s solo exhibitions include: The Tiger’s Tail, San Carlo Cremona, Italy (2022), Harburger Kunstverein (2019), a mid-career survey Dara Friedman: Perfect Stranger, Pérez Art Museum Miami (2017-2018), accompanied by a catalog raisonée published by Prestel, Aspen Art Museum (2017). Friedman is a recipient of the Rome Prize (1999) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2019).

Jill Clause

Jill Clause is a member of the Tuscarora Nation, Turtle Clan. As a mother, grandmother, and college recruiter, Clause is a community leader transmitting indigenous wisdom through storytelling and facilitating roundtable discussions.