GO SEE THE SHOW

Object Poems
Curated by David Abel

November 4 – 26, 2011

Object Poems brings together striking and varied works by contemporary artist-poets and poet-artists: poems in three dimensions; interactive poems; found poems; sculptural and utilitarian poems; conceptual poems; poems that depart in myriad ways from the familiar form of the printed page. The exhibition features more than thirty artists from across the United States, as well as Canada, England, Scotland, and Uruguay, including seven artists from Oregon.

David Abel, the curator, says that “there have been a number of exhibitions and publications devoted to the work of authors as artists: paintings, drawings, sculptures, created independently of the writings for which they are primarily known. To assemble this exhibition, in contrast, I searched for three-dimensional works that had been created as poems, by means of a compositional and poetic practice that was not separate from the artist’s written work. The range of genres, media, and styles is remarkable and demonstrates again the interdependence of advances in all the arts.”