Dao Strom, Travelers Ode (still), 2019. Photo: Roldan Dahwen, E.P. Davee.

The trailer for Traveler's Ode by Dao Strom

Postwar Tablefruit

Dao Strom is an artist whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories.

Artist Bio

Postwar Tablefruit is a multimedia literary project that explores the diasporic identity as an ethos and confluence, both, of place and (dis)placement. Drawing from her own experience as a “1.5 generation” diasporic Vietnamese refugee and immigrant child of a “postwar” era, Dao Strom uses the melding and juxtaposition of hybrid elements—poetry, music, fragmented images, video poetry, sung-poetry, image-text—to create a multifaceted, mytho-poetic experience that embodies the un-containability, mutability, deep mystery and fractures of the hybrid self. Postwar Tablefruit wrestles and reconstructs itself at the peripheries of language, seeking to transpose its own disconnected tongues across mediums. Hauntings and absence, memories and silence, the long reverberations of past violences and obscured histories and mythologies, are currents this project seeks to illuminate. Postwar Tablefruit will take shape as multimedia installations, performance, poetry, and as a beautiful, well-made art book laid out in an experiential way.

Discipline
Literary Nonfiction, Music Composition
Award Year
2016
Status

In Progress

Themes

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Dao Strom

Portland, OR

Dao Strom is a writer and musician based in Portland, OR. Her work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of several hybrid works, including a poetry-art collection and music album, Instrument/Traveler’s Ode (Fonograf Editions & Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Hanoi: AJAR Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Firecracker Award in Poetry; a hybrid-forms memoir, We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People, and song-cycle, East/West (Press Otherwise, 2015); as well as two fiction books, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019 reissue, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). Strom was a 2020 recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has also received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, RACC, National Endowment for the Arts, and others. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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