“The relationship between farmer and land is spiritual, interdependent, and profound. It is an exercise in having faith in a seed’s future. It is the ritual of daily chores. It is the consequent prayers for rain and sunshine. It is the gratitude for a bountiful harvest. It is the inevitable surrender to the Winter. When I was a young man, I asked my father about the idea of reincarnation. He said that the idea was plausible and offered the idea of a volunteer crop of wheat, or a perennial plant as possible evidence. Life continues from birth to death, from seed to harvest, again and again, he reasoned, creating a vision of the farm as a mandala of life—seasonal, perpetual, unrelenting, and eternal.” —David Wayne Reed, Eternal Harvest
Eternal Harvest, Installation, DWR, 2018
Grandmother’s Quilts, Father’s Antique Tractors, Eternal Harvest film.
Eternal Harvest premiered on my family farm in Louisburg, Kansas as part of the Miami County Farm Tour on Mother’s Day Weekend, 2018.
From the shovel that digs to bury to the shovel that digs to plant, Eternal Harvest is a film and seasonal performance installation series about the cycle of life as depicted by the landscape of my family’s rural Kansas farm. Using drones, dance, farm implements, heirloom quilts, and agriculture, Eternal Harvest explores Eastern philosophies of reincarnation through the lens of Western agriculture.
Eternal Harvest premiered in my Dad’s tractor shed on Mother’s Day Weekend as part of the Miami County Farm Tour in 2018. It has been screened at multiple film festivals across the world including: Out Here Now, Kansas City International Film Festival, Middlebury New FIlmmakers Festival, Covellite International Film Festival, Compassion Film Festival, McMinnville Short Film Festival, Ojai Short Film Festival, Fine Arts Film Festival, and Buenos Aires International Film Festival.
ETERNAL HARVEST has played at film festivals around the world. Festivals include: OUT HERE NOW FIlm Festival, Covellite International Film Festival, Kansas CIty International Film Festival, Compassion Film Festival, Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, Goa Short Film Festival, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Ojai Short Film Festival, McMinnville Short Film Festival, Blow-Up International Arthouse Film Festival Chicago, as well as my hometown sesquicentennial, and a Kansas wedding!
Dancers from the Monarch Conservatory of Arts enact Spring in Eternal Harvest.
“The project becomes a conversation between Reed and his roots about the larger existential questions that have no answers – like reincarnation and life after death. Using his personal life story and interests as inspiration, he creates a meditation on existence.” —Mandalas and Marching Bands: David Wayne Reed and his Eternal Harvest
Eternal Harvest is a 2017 Rocket Grant recipient with support from Charlotte Street Foundation, Spencer Museum of Art, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.