Awash in the glow of firelight, Zoë Stiler has been working in the off-grid home she built herself, illustrating stories that come to her through vivid dreams. 

Born into a family of artists, Stiler is primarily self-taught and works in a wide variety of media. Her artworks depict observations from the natural world, record downloads from communications with spirit, and document the mythic journeys of supernatural beings.

A lifelong Taoseño, Stiler lives deep in the vast area known as The Mesa, a sagebrush-dotted landscape on the flat-topped mountains near the west rim of the Rio Grande Gorge. This environment attracts outlaws, runaways, radicals, performers, builders, inventors—people with creative minds, capable hands, and a desire to remake the world. This community and the landscape it is settled within have been a constant source of inspiration for Stiler. 

Stiler’s artworks are raw and embodied, a product of their environment. She paints and draws in a limited palette, using acrylic and oil paint, pencil, charcoal, ink, wax crayon, enamel spray paint, and anything else on hand. Her paintings and drawings are repeatedly worked into, the surfaces built up with depth and texture resulting from many layers of conceptual revisions and material experiments. Works that begin as paintings or drawings often evolve into books or concepts for theatrical productions. Influenced by the elements, light, and movement of the landscape she lives in concert with, she also creates kinetic and illuminated sculptural works that incorporate sewing, weaving, botanical pressing, and micaceous clay building.

Drawing from a deep well of personal mythology, Stiler revisits certain stories consistently, allowing them to take form as a series of works that progress and deepen the narrative. Many of the works in this exhibition have been in progress for the last five years or more, and have never been exhibited. These works showcase some of the major themes and imagery that Stiler has been exploring throughout her life as an artist, representing chapters in an ever-growing book of illustrated tales.

The title of the exhibition refers to several of the key works- “The River,” a painting that Stiler had just begun when a close friend tragically drowned in the Rio Grande. This painting came to symbolize their relationship with the river, and the river’s presence as a powerful force running through the desert landscape. “The Cyclone,” is a large lantern that has been in various states of progress for over ten years. The artist lives with this sculpture in her womb-like earthen home and has an intimate relationship with its light. Its structure is a swirl of found wire, recalling a dirt devil twisting across The Mesa. And the “Other Stories” are numerous– boats with intricate sails adrift on choppy seas, coyotes attacking the artist’s chickens and geese in the night, townfolk forming a procession to carry a luminous otherworldly figure into the depths of the forest, and many more for you to discover. ✺