Celebration of Zena: An Immersive Forest Experience, An Evening of Immersive Sounds, Sights, and Reciprocity with Local Wilderness, featuring new work by Zaneta and Zoe Keller
Description
Join us for a celebration of our beloved Zena Highwoods through an evening of immersive sounds and sights from our local forest. Featuring the premiere of interdisciplinary sound artist Zaneta Sykes’ Invitations from the Land: the Zena Highwoods, an eco-ritual of reciprocity based on the artist’s Filipinx traditions of singing to land in offering. Community members will be immersed in a year of forest soundscapes recorded on the solstices and equinoxes in the Zena Highwoods, interwoven with projections of wildlife illustrations by Zoe Keller, documented during the same time period in the very same forest. Soundscapes and sightings will blend into the autumnal night chorus, as the community gathers under the full moon to sing back to the land in a full circle exchange of listening and sound between human and more-than-human kin.
As a focal point of connection to the forest, there will be an art altar space. Community members are welcome to bring items to place on the altar, such as flowers, art, and poetry – offerings of beauty and gratitude for our local wilderness.
A panel discussion on the Power of Community Art and Science in Local Stewardship will begin the evening, with Miranda Javid of the Woodstock Land Conservancy, local artist and Woodstock native Zoe Keller, and interdisciplinary sound artist and nature recordist Zaneta Sykes.
This evening also marks the release of Invitations from the Land: the Zena Highwoods, an album and book documenting the Zena Highwoods in a year of seasonal recordings and writings by Zaneta Sykes and featuring illustrations by Zoe Keller, created in partnership with the Woodstock Land Conservancy. Signed copies of the work will be available.
Enoki Catskills will be offering cozy fare, inspired by Filipinx cuisine and locally foraged.
About the Presenters
Zaneta Sykes is a Filipinx interdisciplinary sound artist, nature recordist, and medium whose work brings communities into close relationship with their local wilderness through listening, sound, and ritual as sacred expressions of ecological care.
Drawing from the work of their lola sa tuhód (great-grandmother) as a hilot healer in Iloilo, Philippines, and her multi-modal ways of communing with the land, Zaneta weaves hyper-local field recordings, environmental studies, and intersectional activism with sound art, social practice, community art and story-gathering, painting, ritual, and channeling to create experiences of deep communion with the more-than-human world. Experiences that awaken conscious connection to local lands and wildlife, and nurture stewardship through evolving community exchanges between land and people.
Zaneta’s work has been presented in spaces such as the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles Natural History Museum, the Climate Imaginarium on Governor’s Island, and featured on WKNY Radio Kingston and Wave Farm Radio. Their work has been awarded grants by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Arts Westchester, Arts Council of Rockland, and in 2025, they participated in the Strange Foundation Residency.
Zaneta currently serves as the environmental artist-in-residence at Marydell Faith and Life Center at Hook Mountain in Nyack, NY. Their upcoming album and book, Invitations from the Land: the Zena Highwoods (2026), was created in partnership with the Woodstock Land Conservancy and will be released in September 2026.
To learn more about their work, visit www.soundartmagic.com or on Instagram at @soundartmagic
Zoe Keller is a Woodstock, New York native, whose creative upbringing in the rural Catskills shaped her future as an illustrator, artist, and amateur naturalist. As a professional illustrator, Keller’s specialized focus on highly realistic nature illustrations has provided her with the opportunity to work with a w
ide array of clients, including The Nature Conservancy, Penguin Random House UK, Macmillan Publishers, and the New York Times. Keller’s professional illustration practice allows her to collaborate directly with scientists, science writers, and environmental advocates. She finds great joy in translating scientific information into engaging visuals that draw in audiences and spark conversation around complex scientific topics.
Keller’s personally driven studio work draws upon months of research and on-the-ground experiences in wild places. Using graphite and digital media, Keller creates large-scale, meticulously rendered visual narratives that place a special focus on at-risk species and wild lands. Her work highlights the interconnectedness of fragile, vanishing ecosystems, weaving together mysterious life cycles, food webs, and environmental histories. By highlighting the biodiversity at risk in an era of human-driven mass extinction, her work aims to inspire reverence for the natural world and action to defend what we have left. Her drawings have appeared in the National Museum of Wildlife Art, in a public art campaign installed outside of Paris’s UNESCO headquarters, and in galleries and private collections around the world.
Keller is currently working on her first children’s book as author-illustrator: The forthcoming title, to be published by Storey Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, will explore wildlife in the National Parks. Zoe is the co-chair of Stop Zena Development, a community coalition working to protect 625+ acres of forest in the Towns of Woodstock and Ulster. Zoe’s website is www.zoekeller.com
