The fur trade in North Michigan has a tangled and tragic history—buried under every winter’s snow are stories of conflict and coercion, wayfinding and wandering, paths and passages, home-making and homelessness. The tall tales of voyageurs & sagamen grew from an oral tradition of fictions and feelings. The trap as an object is a simultaneous portrait of hunter and hunted: in order to catch what you are seeking, you’ve got to become what you are wanting at. How do you build a catch, a trap, a snare for holding what lies beyond and all around us? The sixth and seventh senses, the unsaid sentence, the pause before, the moment after. The intermission, the interstitial, the ellipses. Traps are tropes, stories write themselves these days, and love is the greatest hunter that ever was.
Mary Rothlisberger is a thinker, writer, reader, hide-and- go-seeker finder situated in the hinterland of North America. Her installation- based work explores universal issues of relating to one another by sincerely engaging in site-specific action and encouraging an inclusive adventurous collective spirit. She’s looking for everything and finding it right here in the middle of nowhere else.