FAMILY STORIES ON PORTALS
Portals 1)
Interview with Aunt Tanya
We discussed aliens, Spirits, and the generally unexplainable. Tanya recounts two significant alien encounters.,, I asked her if she believes that she was abducted when she experienced missing hours/a missing day. I wondered if my UFO encounter happened because I’m a relative of Tanya’s. Tanya and I also discuss the Gagné family and share the information that we’ve found, as well as discussing questions still unanswered, particularly about the two families of Cyprien Amos Gagné. Tanya asked me “Do you know actually? If he was like a...bigamist or if there was some other reason that he had two families?”
This interview furthered my theories about the connections between Portals, time, aliens and the Spirit World through Tanya’s telling of her two alien stories. The first story about seeing a UAP with her babysitter who a few weeks later fell into a coma and died reinforced my theory about UAP’s being connected with bringing Spirits to the Spirit World.
Portals 2)
Family story Mom
One of my favorite family stories told by my Mom is about my matrilineal ancestors. Their surname was originally Wohlmaier; and they lived in Germany. They were known in by their community for having ESP and psychic abilities. My Mom and I coined the term “Meyer moments” to describe our moments of psychic intuition, or downloads, as I often refer to them. I always theorized that this ability was connected to my ability to communicate with Spirits and it was connected to my ability to communicate with Spirits. This story influenced my research into both the paranormal and the human mind. It also inspired my methodology of psychic automatism in the creation of my cyanotypes and the editing of my videos.
Portals 3)
Interview with Laney Skeel, assistance from Mom, in Minneapolis (October 2025)
Laney discusses her relationship with my Grandfather who was a surrogate father for her. Laney is a queer elder in my family, and she discussed a recurring dream she used to have. In the dream “I was falling through the blackness, and there was no one there to catch me. I was outside of my body, and I realized that I could fly.” This quote was inspirational and lined up serendipitously with conversations I had with Inéz and Tavleen about the significance of the color black, especially in relation to Portals and the Spirit World. Audio from Laney was part of my video Coven and also the video FALLING THROUGH BLACKNESS, created for the thesis show of Renata Critton-Papp, Queer Creative Processes.
Laney says in the video Coven, “A new possibility, a new way of looking at things.” Laney’s story inspired my question by providing a first-hand source from a queer Ancestor about recurring dreams. I believe that dreams can also act as a Portal, and Laney’s story furthered my belief.