Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Reading.Writing.

There is a show up at galleryHOMELAND right now. I am often caught describing it as being visual art that displays "paratactical strategies foe reading and writing." The show of visual art, which must feaqture 25 or so artists, had an incredible response at the opening, and a few good write-ups, b ut in the end, I think that the show is incredible, and the appreciation, in print, has been meek.
I am biased. I have a piece in the show. Which may or may not have been a trigger to Lisa Radon's decision to put the showsw together. I have dabbled in sculpture very little since I focused on it in college, though I feel that so much of my work has nonetheless (since and including then) remained on the same track.
The piece, wnefe by Jackson Mac Low a Concrete Poem set to Doom music is a recereation of Jackson Mac Low's algorithmic reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos, or an 800-page book I layered on line after line of white-out, long after I broke the spine. I do think it was an interesting gesture but it wasn't far from the flashlit gallery reading I gave of Finnegan's Wake in 2006.
There is so much interesting work in this show at galleryHOMELAND and I cannot do it justice. Being interested in visual poetry I am, of course, drawn lake a goth to a flame at Derek Beaulieu's contribution(s), which are his readings of a Calgary newspaper, allowing the suggestions of color in each block of prose to take over any other content. Then there is the case I share with Numita Gupta Wiggers, with her textile homage to John Baldessari's "I will not make any more boring art," and one of R.W's seminal inspiration's Patrick Collier, whose visual poems are conceptual excisions from newspapers and the like.
Lisa Radon's own work, who I am also proud to share space with. Is work to be reckoned with, existing at the border of print the blur. Her Paragraphs on Paragraphs on Sentences on Sentences pitch one conceptual text against the other, for a moment, in the end revealing themselves to be the hand, The Hand, perhaps something neith Gertrude Stein nor Sol Le Witt, her sources, would ever admit.
On September 1st, as a part of the exhibit, David Abel, Rodney Koeneke, Lisa Radon, and I will perform at evening o'clock. And it will be terrific.

galleryHOMELAND
SE 11th & SE Division
Sept. 1