 Karla Van Vliet You have no idea how much my mind is blown right now.
My belief was completely flipped, and I am thankful for my guest editor, Meg Reynolds, introducing me to asemic writing in her interview with Karla Van Vliet. So what exactly is 'asemic' writing? - Asymptote Journal Then, why is my mind blown?
My grandmother is a Japanese calligrapher who is ninety-six years old, and she still teaches. I was taught each stroke and each letter has a specific meaning when I calligraphed. I had practiced calligraphy every Saturday evening with my grandmother from the age of five until adulthood. I occasionally practiced in the early morning on Sunday - - crying, ideally joyfully - - when I learned the meaning of shapes, brush speeds, and letters' narratives. I had a perfect example for the proof. 
Fujimoto Ousyuu (藤本鷗舟）
This is my grandmother's work. She wrote Isamu Yoshii's poem, "I should not write a love poem for my first draft" (summarized translation). In other words, you may not scribble until you decide on words with the specific feeling in your mind. When I scribbled, my grandmother said, "Your brush will be rumpled!" But, asemic writing is not just scribbling. Asemic writing is "a global style of writing", and it is an expressing of inner minds that is not easily described with words. And it is also activates the readers' sensory processing. It may be corny to ask, "Am I allowed to do that?" If so, the possibilities of my writing will be expanded. Karla Van Vliet’s newest books are She Speaks in Tongues (Anhinga Press,) a collection of poems and asemic writings, and Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings (Shanti Arts.) She is the winner of the Bacopa Literary Review’s Visual Poetry Award, a Finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound chapbook prize, a finalist for the Tenth Gate Prize, a Forward Prize, a three-time Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net, nominee. Van Vliet’s paintings have been featured in Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate. Van Vliet is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal. She is the creator and curator of Van Vliet Gallery, and an Integrative Dreamwork analyst. Guest Editor, Interviewer: Meg Reynolds  As a writing teacher, I have continuously worked with students of all ages to seek and find their written voice and transcribe it onto the page. Beyond the work of letters, phonemes, and punctuation, I have often asked myself, what lives beneath language? What lives inside the urge to write? My students sense the impulse, but often struggle, as many of us do, to translate the feeling of their ideas into written expression. Writing is an embodied act, but often their ideas crumble within the confines of writing conventions. They get lost in what they’ve been taught, feel inadequate, and lose the thread of what they wanted to say. Sometimes it is profoundly important to labor through these challenges to find their writing voices honed and shining on the other side. However, in the work of Karla Van Vliet, there is another path. Van Vliet’s asemic writing floods and leaps across the page, bending and blending mediums, so that the writing impulse closely aligns with its physical expression outside of the confines of writing itself. What happens when writing is unbound from writing? As you will see in Van Vliet’s work, work of extraordinary heart, fluidity and craft.  “BALLAD OF THE SHORE” Karla Van Vliet Meg Reynolds: Tell me about your history with visual poetry. What led you to it? What does it mean to you? Karla Van Vliet:
My first entrance into visual poetry emerged from learning Chinese brush painting. I first worked in Chinese brush painting at a two hour workshop at the Lincoln Library in Lincoln, VT. Our instructor, Yinglei Zhang, was a practitioner and became an influence of mine in the practice. When I began painting, it was as though I had used the materials since I was born. Rice paper is unforgiving. Any mark that you make on the paper is permanent, even the earliest tentative marks. And even when these early marks are overlaid with firmer, darker ink, the first marks will be seen as ghost marks. You can learn to use these “mistakes” or “accidents” in your paintings as a technique. What is lovely, or what you might wish were different, is that the painting carries its history, much as we do in our bodies. Yet there is a brilliance in this, which is that they inform us and that they can lead to opportunities further down the line. They become part of your vocabulary. 
“VOICE SURGE” Karla Van Vliet
Traditionally brush paintings often include a poem. With the guidance of my brush painting teacher, I wrote poems in Chinese. Or as my teacher put it, paragraphs in Chinese (what I wrote followed none of the strict rules of Chinese poetry.) It felt like a way I could bring two parts of my creative expression together as I am also a poet. Ultimately I took the rules I was given and modified them.
Traditionally, I would have painted copies of existing images for years in a kind of apprenticeship before developing my own brush paintings, but my instructor said, “You’re American. You can do what you want.” So I used the techniques to begin painting Vermont landscapes and developed my own way of working with Chinese characters. Because I don’t know Chinese, to create writings meant searching for characters by meaning and visual impression. Once I had the characters, I integrated them into my paintings. At first in a more traditional way, and then more and more as larger components in the composition of the paintings. 
“HER STORY” Karla Van Vliet
Several years ago, five in November, I dreamt of asemic writing flowing over a full moon; the image fell over and over all night. I was an observer in the dream, taking in frame after frame of written marks and the moon glowing behind them.
I had been introduced to the genre of asemics a few months before. Someone mentioned my work had an asemic feel to it. I didn’t know what asemics were so I did some investigating. I was interested but not until I had the dream did I start using it in my work. As an aside, I’m a dreamwork analyst; I take dreams seriously. So, when I had the dream, I knew there was something important in the practice for me. 
“THE SOURCE, MOON SERIES II” Karla Van Vliet
I started painting with inks and created many small book-page-like images. That spring I proposed to my publisher, Shanti Arts, a collection of asemic paintings accompanied by an essay on asemic writing which was published in January of 2021, as “Fluency.”
Later Kristine Snodgrass, of Anhinga Press, reached out to me wanting to publish my work. The book that came of that is “She Speaks Tongues,” a collection of poems and asemic writings. 
You work in asemic writing. Can you talk more about how your work explores and typifies the genre? Asemics is not thought of as the gesture of writing by all those who practice it, but because I come to it as a writer, a poet, I have thought of asemics as a way to keep my hand in the practice of writing. The brilliant poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly once said to me that we should honor the silences between times of writing. Instead of beating ourselves up about not writing, “am I a poet if I haven’t written a poem in so long?!” that we should think of those times as a part of the practice of writing, a gathering time.
When asemics entered my life, I was in one of those quiet times. I found a kind of grounding in the gesture of writing, a gathering, without the need for words or even an understanding of my written expression, or even what I wanted to express. It was after the fall of 2016 when election results laid bare the difficult realities and history of our country and I thought of my continued expression as defiance against that which the elected administration stood for. My work is more closely linked to writing “form” than other asemic artists. That is, I usually “write” from left to right or from top down. Others are not as tied to this convention. What I am seeing now, in my current work, is the placement of my asemics within a painting, much like the Chinese poem is used, to balance a painting. 
“EARLY MORNING MURMUR THE CHICKADEES” Karla Van Vliet
Someone, I believe Michael Jacobson, one of the fathers of modern asemics, has amended the definition of asemic writing on Wikipedia with “a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context.” I like this very much. But still there is the question of meaning.
People often ask me what the writing says. I say, whatever it says to you… and that can change. If I were going to rename the movement, I would call it parasemic, meaning “side by side”. Of course, a mark can’t have no meaning. A line in the sand has plenty of meaning. The meaning is intuited or perceived, each with their own understanding.
“SINGING WITH THE NIGHTINGALE” Karla Van Vliet
Where do you begin with your pieces? What materials do you use and explore and in what ways does your creative voice (color choice, composition, etc) guide you in building the work? With my newer pieces, to begin, I take a piece of watercolor paper and I draw out where different components will be. I get out my paper cutter and I cut horizon lines. Using acrylic matte medium, I mix in my pigment(s), and then I paint into spaces. I use a variety of techniques to add texture and color, spritz it with water and/or sprinkle in other pigments. In order to create the finished image, I have an exacting collage process where I layer my treated pieces of paper onto a board.
In both my artwork and poetry, I have a process of stilling myself to listen to the symbols and colors of my work (stone, water, birds, and so on), and intuitively decide how each element corresponds to itself to balance into the space of the artwork. I have a few pigments that are my favorites. Also, the horizon line has an important presence in my artwork. In my early years I lived in Lincoln, VT. I would walk out behind our house on South Mountain to a place at the top of the cliffs looking west. You could see an amazing view of the Adirondacks, a horizon of layered mountains. That image has stayed with me. It is one of my earliest memories, and the image touched me deeply. Likely it was the beginning of seeing and collecting images from the landscape around me that I would later mine for my poetry and my artwork. 
“CONFESSIONS IN THE LIGHT” Karla Van Vliet
What relationship does asemic writing have to contemplation? Do you have contemplative practice and if so, how does it feed your work? I grew up as a Quaker, sitting in silence. As a child I learned this quiet space was where one connected with the light (divine) within. Also, as a child I couldn’t sit quietly for an hour and my sister and I were allowed to leave the building and walk down the dirt road to the creak and back as the service continued. I remember the quality of the light, the bird calls, the shadows thrown by stones in the gravel road. This noticing became associated with that space of contemplation. And again, I collected these images.
I often thought of myself born a bird, in this world but not really of it in some way. For years I had a spiritual practice connected to this way of being. I was described as ethereal. Strange to me but also understandable. But more recently I have felt a shift. I feel that this part of my life is centered around learning to be in my body in the world, on the earth. I think it is the opposite of many, to find the earth later in life rather than finding a “spiritual” practice later in life. The way I think of it is that living on the earth is a spiritual practice. In the language of Jesus, Aramaic, heaven and earth can be in the same place, are in the same place. 
“AVA SERIES IV” Karla Van Vliet
My contemplative practice is about becoming as close to myself as possible and to live from that self as much as I can. This doesn’t always look meditative, because becoming close to myself involves all of me, all of my feelings, not just the pleasant ones. My paintings and poetry are containers for this way of being.
How that shows itself in my creative work is that I listen for that inner voice and how it wants to communicate, express in the world, and then I do that. It’s very intuitive. Following the small voice within even when it doesn’t make sense in my mind. Why would I cut the painting there? Use that color? But I do it anyway. Also, painting, writing, asemic writing, are all places, I sometimes think, where I work to create order, or stillness, or a calmness. As one who carries trauma it is one of the ways I process those traumas in myself. I think this is the quality that people see in my work and call Buddhist. 
“CADENCE XVIII” Karla Van Vliet
Who inspires you as you work? Who are some of your earliest visual and poetic influences? Adrian Rich, Audre Lorde, and Mary Oliver were my first poetic influences. Mary Oliver resonated with my connection to nature imagery and Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde for their bravery in speaking their truth, which I needed to do for myself. They gave me a blueprint for doing that. Also, Denise Levertov, Isak Dinesen, early W.S. Merwin. Visually, the landscape of Vermont where I grew up, and such disparate artists as Rothko, Charles Mackintosh and Frida Kahlo. And of course, so many others in so many ways.
At the moment I am reading the brilliant book What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, a nonfiction book about her experience and investigation of Complex PTSD. I’m also reading Kate Partridge’s new book THINE, which is lovely, and The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster which I find very inspiring. Other recent loves: Meg Kearney’s “All Morning the Crows,” Melissa Kwasny’s work, Tom Pickard’s “Fiends Fell,” and Jerry Saltz’s “Art is Life.” 
“THE CURIOUS” Karla Van Vliet
What are you currently working on? My current work is inspired by the river, an inspiration I come back to time and again. There is this lovely little book I discovered via Robert MacFarlane, who wrote the foreword, called “The Water Glossary” by Carol Anne Connolly. It’s a collection of Irish words for or about water. The definitions are fantastic (“gall-shion – severe weather, as if it blew from a strange country”) and it inspired me to create a series of paintings. They are abstracted sky | rock | water | asemics, and recently I’ve added birds, mostly crows/ravens to the pieces.
I am working on paper using acrylic medium and pigments, many of the pigments created from my own flowers. I mount the pieces to a cradle board and seal them so they can be hung as is and not have to be put under glass. Thinking back to the first question; these paintings have a relationship to those early brush paintings with “poem.” Each one also incorporates asemic writing into them, much like a traditional brush painting. Interesting. Hmmmm. 
“A CALL INTO THE SPACIOUS SHADOW” Karla Van Vliet
Working On Gallery Past Guest Editors:
Meg Reynolds Francesca Preston Lúcia Leão  It has been one year since I started interviewing writers and translators for Tupelo Quarterly and RHINO Reviews. Working On Gallery is now entering its fourth year.
When I have opportunities to meet them, I feel that I am in a candy shop making a deluxe ice cream corn! I am honored to have a great time with them, and thankful for their insights. Working On Gallery has taken a turn in January 2023. I still curate articles, and I have also been inviting guest editors to make this website more exciting.  It was coincidental to learn two different approaches to ERASURE projects by two African American creators, Gary Simmons and m. mick powell on the same weekend.
Gary Simmons currently has an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until October 1st, 2023. Simmons' erasure is a smudging effect on race, class, and gender identity issues. The smearing techniques draw attention to historical problems and discrimination more vividly. My guest editor, Meg Reynolds, had an interview with m. mick powell. "When I created the “ERASURE” piece that features a cut-up photo of Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, and their daughter Bobbi Kristina, ...Whitney shares that Bobby would cut her head off of photographs in their home. So I came to a cosmological red: I was thinking of fire, flame, fame, blood, anger, passion, “seeing red,” a spectacular survival." - - m. mick powell Cut her head off of photographs, which is a realization for me. How many women are purposely deleted from our society? How do we ignore the history that created the current "us"? It is important that m. mick powell makes a statement and develops her projects further.
"...Whitney Houston, who was treated so cruelly throughout her career,...when media outlets mocked her while she was emaciated and struggling with addiction. For some, those are the only (or most prominent) images they recall of her. So I want to disrupt those damning and damaging moments (while knowing that they are part of her life and legacy) and ask us to remember her as close as we can get to the girl who she was." - - m. mick powell Past Guest Editors: Francesca Preston Lúcia Leão The aliveness of dead girl cameo: the Collage Work of martina mick powellGuest Editor: Meg Reynolds In my first art history class, my professor walked our class through the arts center to the gallery where there was an exhibition of Byzantine religious icons. The flat shimmering triptychs she showed us were entirely new to me. The distance between myself and the images only lengthened when my professor explained that these icons would have lived in the homes of the wealthy as objects of spiritual contemplation. Wealthy supplicants would stare at and through the image of saints as though they were stained glass shot through with light and lose themselves in the experience of god. How can we compare a pop star and a saint? Both perform miracles. Both astonish and overwhelm. Both develop feverish followings and become objects of intense public focus. Ultimately, both are human and mortal, subject to the violence and trial that often accompanies so much attention. The difference is that in the age of social media, television, tabloid newspapers, and so on, images of the pop star are widely available and ravenously consumed. The systemic injustices that plague specific groups like Black, femme individuals are amplified under the public’s gaze. Their image and the human being are under the constant heat of attention and the icon, saint, person under contemplation must struggle to survive it. In the digital collage work of martina mick powell, we see renewed visions pop icons like Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, and Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopez amongst others that are as prismatic and incantatory as stained glass. However, unlike Byzantine triptychs, powell’s work complicates the relationship to and, in some cases, implicates the viewer with the power of her poetry woven within the image. One cannot view her collages without contemplating the vibrance of her subjects’ as well the struggles they experienced and what role the public played in both their suffering and success. Many of the artists powell centers in her work are Black women artists who died, in powell’s words “too young, too tragically,” often at the height of their powers. In powell’s work, we are asked to return to these faces and contemplate the distance or proximity to the human lives shimmering within them. Whether we see these figures as tragic or exemplary (or both), they are celebrated in powell’s dynamic work.   Meg Reynolds: First off, tell me more about you as an artist and what led you to the collage work you are doing now. martina mick powell: For years, I turned to analog collaging as a sort of self-care craft practice, low stakes. Always text with images, typically pulled from magazines marketed towards femmes and girls. It wasn’t until the pandemic started in March 2020 that I turned to digital collage out of a desire for a larger archive of text and images and a lack of a color printer. Much of the digital collage work I’m doing now is connected to my archival poetic project, dead girl cameo. In dead girl cameo I examine the intersections of celebrity, Black sexualities, intimate partner violence, industry abuse, and death by focusing on the experiences of Black women artists who died too young, too tragically, like Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Minnie Riperton, Tammi Terrell, and others. MG: Can you tell me more about your process? mmp: Collages often open for me with an image—typically a photograph of a Black artist who I’m engaging with in my poetic work, who I admire, and/or whose particular photograph has captured my attention.
I’m initially attracted to the energy of an image and both the colors that appear in the photograph and the colors that come up within me when I encounter it. I love learning more about the picture’s history—the photographer who captured it, where, why, and at what point in the artist’s career. So many of those details make their way into the collage’s layers. Also, my current collage practice is so intimately connected to my poetic practice but the position of the collage in relation to a poem can differ. Sometimes a collage will come before a poem and the subsequent poem will be a sort of ekphrastic on the collage. Sometimes I’m struggling with and through a poem, so I’ll turn to collage to help me access color and texture, to help me come closer to the artist I’m writing about. And, more often, collage is a major component of my revision process. I ask myself: What can this collage teach me about the layers within the poem? About form? About repetition? About perspective and persona? 
A good example of this is the relationship between my collage “GAYLETTER” and my poem “annotation: Frank Ocean performs Good Guy live at Exposition Park.” The poem, an ekphrastic piece on a performance where Frank Ocean forgets the only lyric on Blonde where he uses the word “gay,” preceded the collage.
I struggled so deeply in my revision process of this poem, particularly around form, so I turned to Photoshop and back to the images used in Frank’s interview with GAYLETTER Magazine in 2019, one of his first LGBTQ+ media outlet interviews. The background text is from the coming out letter Frank posted on his personal Tumblr in 2012. It wasn’t until I duplicated, softened, and dissolved his photograph and set it against a trippy, wavy pink background layered with the coming out letter that I was able to figure out a form that I think works well with the poem. Last thing here! Whenever a collage features my own poetry, the images are coming from a physical, personal place. In the “Pay Per View” or “PPV” pieces, the background image is a photograph I took of a clearing in my favorite state forest. The central image comes from my small collection of archival Black erotica magazines and books, so it’s an image that I have physical access to. So those collages are definitely spaces where the material/physical connect with the digital for me. 
MG: What about collage attracts your attention? mmp: Digital collage has made me increasingly excited about the glitch (in a way that feels impossible for me in poetry). As an emerging artist, each time I use Photoshop, I’m learning something new about what it can do to my images.
I’m so enthralled by how a series of relatively unassuming clicks can create a brand new effect, how accidentally selecting a tool can fuck up a collage in the most gorgeous of ways. For example, in “SUEDE BLUE” I went to erase some of the excess from the flowers, but ended up dragging their colors across the entire page. I adored that effect and truly would not know how to replicate it. In these moments, I’m forever thankful for and thinking of Legacy Russell’s conceptualization of the glitch as “digital orgasm,” as “the catalyst, not the error.” So I’m attracted to collage because it allows me this space of visual play and freedom. Collage makes me feel uninhibited enough to pursue my natural inclinations, to layer, to slice, to dissolve, to add color, to strip color, to repeat an image over and over again until it creates a new dimension, to blur, to soften, to sharpen, to invert, to pervert. I think I’m attracted to the inherently perverted nature of collage. 
MG: Color seems to be profoundly important in your images. What inspires your use of color? mmp: The colors originate from the aura and energies of the photographs I’m working with and are then layered and rerendered by what I learn from the archives.
When I created the “ERASURE” piece that features a cut-up photo of Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, and their daughter Bobbi Kristina, I had just rewatched Whtiney’s 2009 interview with Oprah where Whitney shares that Bobby would cut her head off of photographs in their home. So I came to a cosmological red: I was thinking of fire, flame, fame, blood, anger, passion, “seeing red,” a spectacular survival. In my collage “TO THOSE OF EARTH” the color scheme and the text overlay were drawn from the promotional poster for Aaliyah’s first studio album, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,” written and produced by the defamed superstar and convicted sexual abuser R. Kelly, specifically for Aaliyah when she was 14 years old. I wanted to reframe her: a direct stare, no sunglasses, young still, but older. I think I’ve enhanced my use of color over time by putting the palettes in direct conversation with the archive. 
MG: What role does elegy play in these images, particularly of Aaliyah and Whitney Houston? mmp: Like I mentioned before, collage has been so instrumental in my process as I’ve worked on dead girl cameo, which I’m certainly thinking about as an extended eulogy. So in the pieces that feature Whitney, Aaliyah, Left Eye, Minnie Riperton, and other artists I work with in the collection, I’m definitely trying to memorialize and immortalize them in a way.
I’m obsessed with images of these women, especially when the emotion of the artist is one that conveys joy, pain, pleasure, secrecy, release, youth, life. In the collages, we get to see these women as alive—as complex. In my Whitney Houston “OBIT” collage, I was interested in juxtaposing an image of a young, bright, sequined, and smiling Whitney with the New York Times’ headline for her obituary. First, I’m always interested in complicating our emotions around death and I hope this image does some of that work, and secondly, I want to acknowledge that this is the girl and the woman we killed (“we” as a collective audience, collective consumers). How should we remember her? 
MR: It is so clear that each figure you feature in your work appears both as icons and as human beings. Is this your goal? mmp: Yes, this is absolutely a goal of mine—to humanize the artists as much as I can and to get everyone else invested in engaging with them as human beings and to share context and stories about their lives that hopefully help bring them closer to us.
I also think of this especially when I focus on artists like Whitney Houston, who was treated so cruelly throughout her career, particularly from 2000-2007, when media outlets mocked her while she was emaciated and struggling with addiction. For some, those are the only (or most prominent) images they recall of her. So I want to disrupt those damning and damaging moments (while knowing that they are part of her life and legacy) and ask us to remember her as close as we can get to the girl who she was. 
MR: How do you make decisions about which texts to include, especially when the text is not your own? mmp: When I borrow text, I’m usually either borrowing from the artist’s personal archive (interviews, blog posts, lyrics, etc.) or from what I’m reading concurrently, which is almost always something by Ntozake Shange. Text for me functions as another contextual layer to help me centralize a theme or a thought. In “ERASURE,” the background text is from a 1993 Seventeen Magazine feature where women celebrities described the moment they met their partners. In Whitney’s, she writes, “To some people, we were—and still are—a mismatched couple. [Bobby] has this image as a bad boy in the music industry and I’m the good girl…None of that matters because we’re crazy about each other.” I’m so intrigued about the way Whitney talks about Bobby in 1993 versus how she talks about him in the 2009 Oprah interview I mentioned before. The collage is in conversation with all of these moments and more, and I try to make those connections apparent by borrowing relevant text, such as the Seventeen Magazine feature in this piece. MR: In both PPV images, the figure and your poetry both have vibrant and complex things to say about desire. How do you discuss desire in your work? 
mmp: I hope that I’m discussing desire as the lovely, messy, complicated, layered, intense, fascinating, fucked up entity that it is. I’m particularly interested in the origins of desire; the major and minor cataclysms that create our pleasure propensities. In dead girl cameo, I’m also thinking a lot about the conflation of death and desire for me—how difficult it is for me to separate the two. MR: Who are you looking at and reading as you make this work? mmp: I’m always reading something by Ntozake Shange, which is why her words often appear in my collages. Other favorite poets of mine include June Jordan, Morgan Parker, Ai, Tiana Clark. I’m working through Wanda Coleman’s selected poems Wicked Enchantment now, and enchanted I am indeed! My favorite artists are Mickalene Thomas (of course), Ming Smith, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Laura Aguilar, Petra Collins. I’m always listening to Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Frank Ocean, Minnie Riperton, Noname, Orion Sun, WILLOW, Sade, Tammi Terrell, Chaka Khan, Rihanna. Especially when I’m working on a collage featuring a musician, I’m definitely listening to their discography as I’m creating. MR: Who is your ideal audience? Who are you making this for? mmp: Black femme survivors, including myself. “I feel like my legs have been cut off.” - Introducing Lauren Ari, Guest Editor: Francesca Preston6/18/2023
I am so excited to have the third article by guest editors for Working On Gallery.
Francesca Preston introduces Lauren Ari who is a Richmond-based sculptor and painter. Her work is poetic and philosophical. Her art show has been well received. It may be a bit old, but there is a You Tube video that shows her ceramic works that can give you context. She also had a great profile in the Fouladi Project and its studio visit. You may also like Preston's past article about her creative process. Past Guest Editor - Lúcia Leão  "Rooster’s Wake Up Call" - Paper, Acrylic, Clay - Lauren Ari Circumstances Happen, & I Follow ThemIntroducing Lauren Ari Guest Editor: Francesca Preston Lauren Ari and I first met many years ago at a class called the Drawing Circus. It wasn’t so much of a “class” as an opportunity to make self-directed art within a constantly shifting cacophony of moving models, objects, light & music. The teacher’s name was Ed Stanton, and he was notorious. (Once, in the middle of a session, a half-nude model pulled a boa constrictor out of her attache case.) Lauren and I were drawn to each other like ants to honey. Perhaps there was a certain hunger, or visual language, we recognized in each other. We had each been to our own version of the underworld, and the class was like a weekly godsend. I was coming out of a health crisis, and during the class discovered my signature sumi ink on vintage paper pieces, which Lauren described as “impossibly elegant.” “You were so cool,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d want anything to do with me!” Lauren was in the first years of raising a daughter, and finally clawing her way back to art practice. I remember her saying, with a brusqueness and humor typical of Lauren, “I feel like my legs have been cut off.” I adored this honesty. No sugar coating. And no wonder the body so often figures in various forms of transformation or truncation in Lauren’s work. “Most of my life is about trying to keep myself steady,” she says now.  "Amphetype" - Clay - Lauren Ari  "Diastole of Your Heart" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Wood Panel, Acrylic - Lauren Ari We lost touch for years, and reconnected during the pandemic, after Lauren read my newsletters and piece for Working on Gallery. She invited me to her studio for tea and small molasses cookies. I felt a shocking lust for her artwork. I wanted to touch everything I saw, take her sculptures and dictionary pages home with me, learn their sharp curves and lick their buttery edges. Words and faces lace many of her pieces. As a poet and mark-maker, I feel at home in her earthy, papery terrain. (But I am envious of her prolific nature!)  "Dirt is Not Dirty Till its Out of Place" - Red Clay Plate - Lauren Ari  "Bending Toward Being" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Acrylic - Lauren Ari Soon after, I visited her show DREAMFORMS, at the Richmond Art Center in the East Bay of California, where our Drawing Circus class first set up its wild tents. I remember Lauren saying that a gallery is not the ideal place for her work; she wants her art to be surrounded by people living and eating, by the joyous jumble of a cafe or a garden. And yet, her vivid paintings on pages cut from an old Funk & Wagnalls dictionary, and large multi-layered clay urns dreamily intended for recomposted remains, seemed to become eerily animate as they sent sparks across the space.  "Bed of Beasts" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Acrylic - Lauren Ari  "Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil" - Clay Urn - Lauren Ari About her own work, Lauren Ari writes:My art making has been a source of refuge and meditation. My studio is where I revisit what happens in a day, both internally and externally. I rarely have a particular agenda except to follow what wants to arise.  Ari Studio I work with many materials, but the foundation of my art always comes back to drawing. Working in clay, wood, metal, and textile enables my drawings to be three-dimensional.  "Cause and Effect" - Unglazed Clay - Lauren Ari I feel my artwork speaks from a freedom of process that can be difficult for many to achieve. When you look closely, you feel as if you've gone — with my permission — into the recesses of my mind, where light and dark co-exist. I suppose my gift is that I am able to quiet the judgmental, critical mind, and keep moving. My process is like traveling. I might start with a drawing, then do a little writing about the drawing. Then I might take the drawing and create a sculpture related to it. I bounce around between different mediums within a day, and it’s a bit like having a conversation. Each material inspires something different within me.  "Lost" - Charcoal, Paint, Wood Glue, Ink on Paper - Lauren Ari  "Spilling Over" - Acrylic and Collage - Lauren Ari The energy that creates my art is faster and more capricious than my actual self; I feel as though it moves me and moves through me. I trust something bigger than myself. A lot of what I do is intuitive; I don't set out with an agenda, method or finished product in mind. Circumstances happen, and I follow them. When a piece wants to come out of me, I have to move fast. This is heaven. And the best feeling for me is when someone feels met in my art, so that they're moved to take a piece home with them as a reminder of their own inner freedom.  "Falling of Olga" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Acrylic - Lauren Ari  "Empathy" - Clay Plate - Lauren Ari "Lauren Ari's art roars out of the deepest part of her psyche and arrives with great tenderness into the world. It is fiercely honest, playful and provocative. She speaks directly what is still unfettered in all of us, our wild, free, animal selves."  Lauren Ari is an artist and educator based in Richmond, California. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts from U.C. Davis after undergraduate study at the Rhode Island School of Design and CCAC. Her primary focus is on drawing and sculpture. Lauren's work is in the permanent collections of the Legion of Honor Achenbach Foundation and the De Young Museum. Instagram: @thelaurenari  Guest Editor:
Francesca Preston is a writer and visual artist based in Petaluma, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Phoebe, Crab Creek Review, Stonecoast Review, Feral: A Journal of Literature and Art, Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, and RHINO. The chapbook If There Are Horns is available from Finishing Line Press, and her microchap This Was Like I Said All Gone is part of Ghost City Press' 2022 Summer Series. Instagram: @francescalouisepreston  The House of Vettii in Pompeii. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto I visited several museums in Italy - - my partner and I drove through Milan, Pisa, Rome, Napoli, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Orvieto, Firenze, and Venezia - - and observed (overwhelmingly) a lot of historical art and archeological sites. Human story-telling techniques have not changed much over time. However, it is so cool to witness the progenitors of graphic literature. So, I temporarily (easily) categorized two types of Italian graphic story telling techniques:
1. Art without wordsEven though there are no words, audiences will understand a story. I would like to show you an example from a mural in Pompeii. Some murals survived in Pompeii and Herculaneum. The two cites were buried under volcanic ashes and pumice stores by Mount Vesuvius (6th–7th century BCE). Herculaneum was recently found, and archeologists have been digging up Pompeii for over three hundred years. In Pompeii, the House of Vettii, Domus Vettiorum in Latin, was recently unveiled after 20 years of restoration. I took pictures of some murals about angels' stories. In this, angels perform human tasks - - such as make bronze trinkets, weigh their products, and ride carriages.   The House of Vettii in Pompeii. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto On each mural, there are main and sub stories. For example, epic Greek stories were told on the main walls, and everyday life sketches were designed on side walls or small spaces. I loved seeing the ancient comics. Especially on the above murals, where the angels comedically mimic human life. One angel falls from its ride. And all their faces are so unique and cartoonish. The mural is just like the Far Side or Snoopy. I saw the story-telling style, "Art without words", a lot in early Italian works.  "Pacino di Bonaguida: Tree of Life (1305-10) panel painting" at the Academia Gallery in Firenze. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto This is another great example of art without words. This is the bottom of Pacino di Bonaguida's panel painting at the Academia Gallery in Firenze. It is the most popular story of Adam and Eve, the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions. By the 14th century, the story was ubiquitous. Therefore, there is little need for words to explain what is going on. 2. Art with one short sentence or a couple of words "Annunciation with St. Ansanus and St. Maxima" at the Academia Gallery. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto  From the 14th century art, I started noticing words on paintings. When I saw this art, I quietly screamed, "This is graphic literature!" And I was so happy to read the descriptions of the art. The curator wrote, "The Archangel Gabriel's greeting to the Virgin, is engraved on the gold background almost in the manner of a modern cartoon." Gabriel is on the left and Maria is on the right. Gabriel said, "ave gratia plena dominvs tecvm (Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee)". Between them, there is a lily stem - - symbol of purity (almost cliché for all classical Italian art) - - and look at Maria's face! She is like, "What~ No, thank you."
This is definitely line-break hyper awareness! My idea of line-break hyper awareness means that one that guides the reader’s eyes and emotions through poetic lines with static materials. The golden line starts from the bottom left to top right, which is counter to common human eye reading motions, especially current western graphic narratives. In addition, why does the spoken line need to support the art? The previous Adam and Eve painting does not have any words. Everyone knows about the Virgin Mary's story, right? However, the painter decided to add the golden line with an expensive embossing technique. This is an emphasize to reinforce the viewers' dramatic impression. It is so cool to see the origin of line-break hyper awareness.  Photo Credit: Robert Lifson, Background Photo from the Art Insitute of Chicago When my poem, "Lake Michigan" (page 50, Wherever I'm At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry), was broadcasted by NPR News: BEZB Chicago, Robert Lifson, a senior photographer in the imaging department at the Chicago Art Insitute, kindly sent me a comment on it. ”...Water is life-giving, a rhythmic heartbeat of waves give life to the land it washes up upon and retreats. Japanese water is its own sacredness and nourishment which I feel feeds even your poem, but it seems that like blood type, there is water type. Lake Michigan is not your water type. You are in need of something it cannot provide. Through our email conversations, I learned that Lifson was a professional photographer who just finished working with Salvador Dalí's exhibition (until June 12, 2023). "There are two large security doors I pass through each morning, to enter my studio where the power, mystery and beauty of art is there to greet me. I am grateful every morning." - - Robert Lifson  "Lights, Camera, Reaction: Technical Imaging" - The Art Insitute of Chicago In recent years, museum photographers and curators find amazing hidden details under advanced lighting technologies using ultraviolet light, infrared light, and transmitted light. He took a photo of Inventions of the Monsters (1937) in infrared light. This is one of the iconic paintings by Dalí. If you do not know this art, there is a burning giraffe in the top right corner, and human-like creatures on the left side. Then, if you see this art carefully, there is a dog in the bottom right. With the infrared light, this dog has two adorable eyes. I can gaze at the dog forever! If you visit the website, you are able to grab the arrows in the middle of the slider and compare normal light (slide left) versus UV light (slide right) to experience how Lifson approached and archived historical collections. He talked more about his process at their museum website. I create graphic poems, and my absolute nemesis is photographing my own work. I am the worst. I often excuse my lackluster results with, "I don't have a high-quality camera", so my publisher had to hire a photographer for GLYPH. Actually, I was really happy with the decision of recording my graphic poems with high quality art techniques, something I was never able to achieve before. I cannot afford that type of luxury. And, you must know - - current cellphones have good cameras and technology, and there are many instructive tutorials - - but nothing encouraged me for a long time. Now, I decided to ask the photographer who works at one of the most splendid museums in the world how to take great photos with household materials. Robert Lifson: Photo-graphy, however it's done, follows its name. Light is first and essential to understand in order to produce the image, the desired effects, that one wants to capture. The better the camera, the more resolution or features, but three techniques I'd point out are lighting configurations, and a fourth, camera positions. First, assuming that the setup is lighting from the left and right sides and the camera above in the middle of the art work, turn off one side of lights and see how the raking light brings out features of the work.  Naoko Fujimoto: I followed this instruction. But this is a bad example. Do you know why? Second, with this in mind, use the opposite set of lights either evenly or ratio lighting, so the raking effect is less harsh, more pleasant and still bringing out features or highlights of the work. Another option is to use one set of lights and a white bounce card opposite. Even lighting can often mute the final capture. Third, if the use of white walls or large bounce cards is possible, indirect light, diffuse light works well with reflective or gilded material.  Lifson: If you are using household lamps, make sure to have the same bulb in each lamp, so as to not mix warm and cool light, and take off the lamp shade, as it will affect the color of light and be less even. But experimentation is always helpful. A reminder: orient the top of the work in the direction of one side of the lighting when using ratio lighting. For relief or layered artwork, be mindful of shadows and rotate the work in your lighting setup to see what is most pleasant to the eye. For camera use, it is especially helpful to use software that can stitch individual detail captures into a whole or realign distorted captures, which allows for the camera to be more versatile. Shooting off-center, or the camera angled a bit can avoid glare and specular highlights and then corrected in the software.  Fujimoto: I know it is not perfect, but I found a significant difference. Lifson: There are hard and fast rules to photographing artwork but as you begin, with the setup you have, you can use the above instructions as a guide, then improvise, adapt, invent what you need to in order to see your work photographed in the best light possible. For camera use, it is especially helpful to use software that can stitch individual detail captures into a whole or realign distorted captures, which allows for the camera to be more versatile. Shooting off-center, or the camera angled a bit can avoid glare and specular highlights and then corrected in the software. Robert Lifson is an artist, photographer, involved in cultural heritage imaging with the Art Institute of Chicago for many years, he has been able to observe those whose preserve the past and those who create new a present; the process of destruction and creation that is the heartbeat of human existence.
 I am so excited to introduce Lúcia Leão's second curation. Her previous article was with Angela Quinto. In this article, Leão chose visual poetry projects by a Brazilian artist/poet, Marcelo Sahea, along with a Brazilian poet, Dirceu Villa. INTRODUCING MARCELLO SAHEALúcia Leão - Guest Editor  "Linguagene" (2022) gel, marker, graphite, fabric marker, and dermatograph pencil on unbleached cotton 70 x 70cm Marcelo Sahea When Naoko Fujimoto invited me to select guests to her gallery, I thought of Brazilian artists and replicated Fujimoto’s gesture. I invited Dirceu Villa, a Brazilian poet who lives in São Paulo, to be part of the project. He helped me find and contact visual poets in Brazil. Marcelo Sahea is the second artist. The three of us are introducing to you in this vibrant collective space that Fujimoto’s Working on Gallery opens to us. Poet, essayist, translator, performer, composer, visual and sound artist, Marcello Sahea was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. He has published four books: Carne Viva, Leve, Nada a Dizer, and Objeto Intersemiótico, and the albums Pletórax and Preparando Meu Próximo Erro. He works with video art, and has participated in digital art shows, exhibitions of sound poetry, visual poetry, and video poetry in Brazil and in several countries. Marcello has performed his work in Brazil, Mexico, and Spain. Dirceu Villa (1975) is a Brazilian author of seven books of poetry, the latest of which is ciência nova (2022). His work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Rattapallax (USA), Alforja (Mexico), alba Londres (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France) and Atelier (Italy). He has translated Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Mairéad Byrne, and Jean Cocteau into Portuguese. INFINITE DEMANDEssay by Marcelo Sahea  "Moby Dick – chapter 1" (2021) Nanquim (indian Ink) and marker over Canson 15 x 21cm Marcelo Sahea Ana Hatherly used to say: What distinguishes an individual is the singularity of voice, even on the sacred level. Immersed in uncertainties, I say this image−of a distinction−is not limited only to speech, to the tongue, or even to the oral cavity. The movements hands and feet make in their errant paths, their exuberance, the economic strokes full of tension, reluctant, nimble, temporary, or surreptitious emulate this orality of mine on the surface of a support, be it a sheet of paper, a white canvas or the space that surrounds me. “Making” is the only possibility, and this axiom continually resonates in my creative process in the attempt at condensing errors into calligraphy.  "raiva/beleza" (2022) – “anger/beauty” acrylic paint, gel, glue, salt, and sawdust on paper 29,7 x 42cm Marcelo Sahea In one of the essays in my book Objeto Intersemiótico - escritos sobre poesia expandida [Intersemiotic Object – Texts about Expanded Poetry, not available in English], I say that to err is to walk, not to wander aimlessly, but to wander not at random (In Portuguese, the expression for “at random” is “a esmo,” and the verb “esmar”, from Latin “aestimare,” means “to judge, calculate.”) At times, the unexpected (the novelty, the new) reveals itself in my work in an asymmetrical weaving imposed by the laborious repetition of verses, sentences, neologisms, vocabulary fragmentation, etc. Sometimes, materials and tools affect each other, through fortuitous textures, accidental collages, created by the attempt at blurring the limits of coherence or only the variability of procedures.  "The Death of Metaphor" (2022) acrylic, spray, gel, marker, and dermatograph pencil on unbleached cotton 70 x 70 cm Marcelo Sahea I see my conversation with visual arts as a corollary of my work with the word. The word is the foundation of my work. I started to make poetry professionally when I was 15, combining verses, painting, and drawing. With the advent of the internet, I migrated to what has conventionally been called “digital poetry”—poetry made with the computer—and that is where I have stayed for at least 20 years. Today I revisit the guiding principles for my work in a circular process, practicing what I now also consider “digital poetry,” but one made with my fingers, with my own digits, my own fingerprints. Repetition and chance are substantial concepts that permeate the way I have been inhabiting the condition of a poet, since I was nine years old. Perhaps today, with these works, I am looking for another condition, one that leads me to unknown or untraveled paths. After all, as René Char said, “Each act is virgin, even the repeated ones.” Porto Alegre - RS Brazil / March 2023  "parto/porta" (2003-2022) – “childbirth/door” dermatograph pencil, Nanquim (indian Ink), and acrylic paste on paper 29,7 x 42 cm - [“parto” also means “I leave”] Marcelo Sahea Essay by Dirceu Villa Marcello Sahea is one of the very few in Brazil who are developing a work that is both poetry and visual arts, and a work that becomes increasingly complex. He is constantly incorporating new layers to his practice. In the beginning, Brazilian concrete poetry was a fundamental reference, but now Marcello’s art has become so unique that it would be difficult to establish its driving forces without tracing a huge map of connections between word, image, and sound. In its graphic inventiveness, one could see Edgard Braga (1897-1985) as a magnetic part of that field, but also, in its vortex, we would definitely find Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988): the mixture of a raw, fierce take on the materials gets combined with the sophistication of its language, its ductile fluidity, and an almost infinite variation of possibilities.  "ostra/astro" (2022) - “oyster/star” dermatograph pencil, Nanquim (indian Ink), gel, and bitumen on paper 29,7 x 42cm Marcelo Sahea Marcello’s remarkable material approach to the making of such poetry that is visual arts is not his only strong suit: his vocal performance is as complex as his usage of the image, tending to a musical creation that borrows instrumental interventions from percussion and digital soundscapes and takes them to a vivid operation inside the words themselves. The same can be said of his awareness of design and patterning. The polysemic nature of his distortions of words has, admittedly, a source in James Joyce (1882-1941), and, in this sense, it can evoke numerous meanings by tweaking two or more words into a new fertile one. In the works presented here, the verbovisual entanglement is at full display, but it is also interesting to keep in mind all his wonderful, singular ways of making (here a very precise word) poetry.  Marcello Sahea’s salt, sand, and sawdust are spread out and glued in ways that can help the reader become the poet−get closer, squint their eyes, and notice the texture. The work with illegibility and small letters is part of this move to promote interaction and engagement. Besides being a poet and visual artist, Marcello is also a body therapist. “The body is a hiding place. The body hides me.” After experimenting with feet calligraffiti and noticing his feet were learning to write, he went back to using his hands for the pieces with calligraphy. Marcello wants the unlearning, to be surprised by what he creates. With the distortion of a single letter a new body is visually born. He defines himself as a follower of Joan Brossa, the Catalan poet and graphic artist. Many of his works are homages to Brossa. In his art, Marcello often plays with shadows, with visual echoes of the lines that compose words and sentences. In some of his pieces, there are spaces between words big enough to allow the significance of letters to be stretched out from their usual arrangement. There are extensions and breaks in the images. A new time for fruition is produced. Marcello can be described as a man of few words if we consider part of his work presented here. Or of many, if we also consider his poetry performed and sung into magic through verbal rituals of repetition, and repetition, and expansion. (Some of his performances can be found here) Growing up, Marcello had the presence of the word-sound, of music, very near. His father was a songwriter and a poet who collected vinyl records. It was through him that Marcello came to know Caetano Veloso’s album “Araçá Azul,” which awakened in him the desire to explore more deeply the experimental nature of words, of the word performed. This continuous research is taking him back now, again, to his own body as an instrument. Guest Editors:
Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, and elsewhere. It is also included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia holds a master’s degree in Brazilian literature (UERJ–RJ, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism (University of Miami–FL, USA). She is a book reviewer for RHINO literary magazine, a volunteer copyeditor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and a board member for TCLA, a non-profit organization based in West Palm Beach, Florida. She has been living in South Florida for 30 years.  I visited a house where the Ogura waka-poetry anthology was selected in the 12th century. The Enri-an Temple (厭離庵) is located in the Arashiyama area of western Kyoto. Thanks to my mother who had the guts to look for it, while I was giving up. We got lost in an isolated bamboo field looking for this hidden house. There was nothing around us (and it was super cold), and one local man passing through with a truck full of traditional Japanese gardening tools even asked, "Do you really want to visit there?" My mother and I finally visited and spiritually said "hello" to two incredible poets, Rensyō and Fujiwara no Sadaie. In my translation workshop, I often mention that the original waka poems were written on thick paper for dividers, sliding doors, and windows. Rensyō asked Fujiwara no Sadaie to decorate his house, which is the origin of the anthology. This is not the original house, but there are definitely remnants of antient spirits here. I was so thrilled to actually orient myself and breath in the atmosphere around! I have been translating waka poems from the Japanese anthology Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ( 小倉百人一首 ), which is more simply referred to as Hyakuninisshu , meaning One Hundred Poets, One Waka Poem Each. It is a work of great literary-historical significance, and remains one of the most widely read and translated Japanese texts today. More about Hyakun Isshu Process:
 Art by Allan Haverholm, from "When the last story is told" (2015) I have been curating RHINO Poetry's *graphic* book reviews. This is a big annual celebration for RHINO and many people are looking forward to "reading" the reviews.
In case you do not know about our graphic reviews, our contributors introduce and review books with words & images. They are not traditional book reviews because our readers have to participate by analyzing images along with reading the written portions. Through the years, some graphic reviews took on qualities of contemporary art - - less words - - therefore, I ask my contributors to write a short essay along with their art interpretation because RHINO Poetry publishes book reviews. Book reviews aim to have clear messaging to properly portray books to potential audiences. Allan Haverholm saw Tana Oshima's graphic review and introduced RHINO *graphic* Reviews in a British podcast, Comics for the Apocalypse. Oshima recommended it to me, and I eventually started communicating with Haverholm. He studies and writes about various concepts of uncomics in Sweden. Those are four things those uncomics want: To not be figurative, but also to sing, dance, and to jump hurdles, all made possible by the subversive maneuver of declining sociocultural perceptions, and of conjugating linear narrative into labyrinths or rhizomic networks. They want to be uncomics. Uncomics is new to me, so I decided to ask Haverholm three questions. After I learned about uncomics, I had the fantastic idea to have book reviews without words. I am considering what different curators aim to achieve with their platforms, and am excited to explore this idea.  Art by Allan Haverholm, from "Time & memory" (2020) What are uncomics?Uncomics are works that use visual language and structures from other art forms to expand upon the field of comics — or modern and contemporary art that employs comics characteristics. But "uncomics" covers both the artistic practice and the research into the works. The term came from the need to theorise that growing, experimental periphery without getting bogged down by, say, superhero or graphic novel discourse — and the name is a nod to the fact that most readers of traditional comics will look at these works and say "Yeah, but those aren't comics". So, in one sentence? " Uncomics is an artistic and research field where traditional comics end but formal characteristics of comics intersect with the wider arts" Uncomics – an artistic field where contemporary art and comics inform each other. Give two examples of uncomics and explain what makes them that.I'll give you a comics example and one from 20th Century art. Example One: "Spider" by Gareth A Hopkins, 2021  Gareth is an abstract artist who works mainly in comics. Because the visuals of his work leans toward abstract art, only the text implies a conventional reading direction. Yet the page layout gives the work away as a comic, and it was anthologised along with more traditional, figurative comic works. It is the ambiguous meaning and directionality of the visuals that make this an uncomic, because it opens the work up to interpretation and analysis outside the comics theory toolbox. And in that interpretive process of decoding and navigating the pages, the reader takes on a co-creative, puzzle solving role that goes beyond pure reading or viewing. Example Two: "Untitled (triptych)" by Joan Mitchell, 1971-3  "Untitled (triptych)" by Joan Mitchell, 1971-3 In many ways, the triptych (and other multi-paneled artworks) is structurally comparable to newspaper comic strips. However, in visual arts the triptych is a multiplication of canvases, whereas the comic strip is a condensation, like a haiku form compared to comic books and graphic novels. Joan Mitchell did several multipanel works, but in this one she adds an extra dimension by composing each panel from roughly rectangular colour surfaces, not unlike Gareth Hopkins' page layouts. In an uncomics perspective, she turns the basic comic strip structure into a metatextual space where each comics panel is itself more like a comics page consisting of several subdivisions, or metapanels. On a side note, both of these examples are painted but because the field of uncomics casts a wide net, an art installation or sculpture might also be considered an uncomic. What is the Uncomics podcast, who are the guests and what are the subjects? I have called the Uncomics podcast an "online symposium" into the field of uncomics. For the first season I recorded and published a dozen artist talks with some of the leading artists in the field, such as Gareth A Hopkins, Rosaire Appel, Warren Craghead and Aidan Koch, to give a cross section of the wider practice. With each I talk about their oeuvre and vision, and try to contextualise it in terms of other, contemporary art forms — including of course comics. The next season will shift its focus toward scholars and theorists that work within fields I have found adjacent to the works and artists from season one. I am attempting to build a framework that will bridge art history and comics theory — or that is my thesis at least, I'm still only preparing talks for the second season.  Photo by Zenia Johnsen Allan Haverholm is a graphic artist, independent artistic researcher, editor, curator and performer. His experimental comics practice has been exhibited across Europe and North America, and he has given talks, courses and workshops across Northern Europe. Since his 2015 abstract comic "When the last story is told", he has formulated the field of uncomics to describe and study similar multidisciplinary practices in comics and contemporary arts
 Gifts from Francesca Preston Working on Gallery does not have a new article this December; however, there is so much content you may enjoy reading and experiencing.
Working On Gallery Past Guest Lists Something is Going On This is a new blog where I showcase interviews and reviews outside Working on Gallery. Graphic Poetry Study Guide Site Map of Study Guides WG Instagram I renamed my website to FUJI HUB in hopes that this website becomes a way station where people come and find other outlets. There are many articles and writers' & artists' website links. Working On Gallery is one of the projects. Please explore! 
I am so excited to introduce Lúcia Leão as a guest editor. I met her when I stayed at the Betsy Hotel by SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) residency programs. Leão is originally from Brazil, and she occasionally travels between Miami and Chicago. When she is around, we visit the Art Institute of Chicago and talk about poetry, translation, and art. In this article, Leão curated visual poetry projects by a Brazilian artist/poet, Angela Quinto, along with a Brazilian poet, Dirceu Villa. --- NOTE: The majority of this interview and details are originally written in Portuguese. Leão translated them into English.  Lúcia Leão - Guest Editor INTRODUCING ANGELA QUINTO Lúcia Leão - Guest Editor When Naoko Fujimoto invited me to invite guests to her gallery, I thought of Brazilian artists and replicated Fujimoto’s gesture. I invited Dirceu Villa, a Brazilian poet who lives in São Paulo, to be part of the project. He helped me find and contact visual poets in Brazil. Angela Quinto is the first artist. The three of us are introducing to you in this vibrant collective space that Fujimoto’s Working on Gallery opens to us. Angela Quinto once said if she could be an animal, she would be a buffalo−or a termite, because of the kind of writing termites make, “so kindergartenish.” This is a compliment to termites, since for Angela, writing her presence in the world has been an act−many acts−of freeing interventions that go deep into the matter of composition.  This Brazilian artist who lives in São Paulo is a poet, performer, weaver, and therapist. She was also a clown, part of a group called “Little Company of Mysteries and Nonsense,” with two other women. “Termites” is the title of her series Cupins. These insects entered her poetic perception more vividly when she had to take care of the furniture she inherited from her father’s printing business. Family history is also present in “Anyletters” (Quaisquercartas), in which she used the letters exchanged by her parents during their engagement period (1950-1952) to create a space for what she calls instanternity. Angela’s brother was a typographer, and a visit to a printing press in São Paulo a few months after his death inspired her work “I lost my tongue abroad” (Perdi minha língua no estrangeiro). “It was like walking backward... In August 2022, she launched Fosse porque fosse (For Whatever Reason), “almost a poem, a hybrid text with an undefined territory” crossed by her “body-language,” after she experienced the kidnapping (her word) of a sibipiruna, a tree native to Brazil, across from her house. It is with the work of decomposition, the repetition of impressions, and of movable types that Angela engages her whole body. Using the fragmentation of her own work, she breaks unity−time and again−also with her voice. A friend who listened to her performance “ver o poema desmontado” (“see the poem disassembled,” link below) said her cat ran to the sliding door, probably thinking it had heard a bird sing. Angela’s work and her performances file the edges of circularity, of time, of types.  Dirceu Villa[1] introduced Angela Quinto (1955 - current). Villa wrote that Quinto is composing a body of work (and, in this case, “body” is a very precise word) in Brazil that ranges from poetry to the visual arts, performance and ritual. Her amazingly inventive mechanism combines important references in Brazilian art, of such artists as Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1909-1989) and Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), among many others. But her dynamic is unique in creating objects meticulously crafted with a deep knowledge of the graphic arts, with the manipulation of the object trouvé (breathing life into them when operating their transformation into figures of speech), with apt knitting of symbolic patterns, charged with meaning, allusive to the work of the ancient fiandeiras, composing talismans that become part of performances reenacting lost rituals. She also naturally brings together the three great ethnic origins of Brazil: Indigenous, African, and European (particularly, Portuguese). But this is only a part of her multiple visual and performative repertoire, which is also a part of her poetic writing. The word is as fundamental to her art as it was for the great Catalan master Joan Brossa (1919-1998). It is not a coincidence that both were fascinated by the circus, and have experimented with its unusual trickery, its distorted mirror-image of the world as a way into the deep recesses of the human experience. Angela Quinto writes poems that carry with them an amalgam of Brazilian traditions down to its linguistic labyrinth: she joins the modernist experiments of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) in a book like Macunaíma (1928), and Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967), who would forge a new language based on Brazilian Portuguese, blending different etymologic, polyglot sources into a speech that would depict with inventiveness the way Brazilian sertanejos speak. Quinto doesn’t make polyglot reinventions of language as Rosa does: her particular way of writing is aware of a wide range of Brazilian speeches and their use, combining the Afro-Brazilian tradition of the candomblé, its rhythms, the chants of the Guarani people and a very keen knowledge of Brazilian and Portuguese traditions of poetry and song. --- [1] Dirceu Villa (1975) is a Brazilian author of seven books of poetry, the latest of which is ciência nova (2022). His work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Rattapallax (USA), Alforja (Mexico), alba Londres (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France) and Atelier (Italy). He has translated Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Mairéad Byrne, and Jean Cocteau into Portuguese.  Photos by Angela Quinto  Cupins Termites - Angela Quinto Interviewed and Translated by Lúcia Leão 3.100 known species, less than 10% are pests, bioindicators of ecosystem health, they contribute to water retention, porosity and aeration of the soil, help in the carbon-hydrogen balance, are a source of protein and resources for the production of medicines, feed on cellulose, wood, grasses, herbaceous plants, nocturnal creatures almost blind, they act almost in secret, térmita, siriri, sililuia, ririruia, aleluia, arará, salalé, muchém, itapicuim, kupi’i. Termites are super decomposers. The traces they leave in decomposition suggest a writing. Considering that animals don't need to enter language, because they are already in it; the one that sensorially opens up to its cracks and that, without limitations, enters into a state of astonishment, opens new paths of knowledge. A writing analogous to the corporeal system, like the kindergarten language in children's drawings, like the footprints of birds on the sand, or even in Chinese ideograms. Consonance between text and image, language as a kind of algebra, an ancient voice, a powerful sound heard from silent creatures.  Plaquette  Poetry Performance by Angela Quinto in Portuguese Cartasquaisquer Anyletters - Angela Quinto Interviewed and Translated by Lúcia Leão My work seeks to contact experiences of life&death&life. It is an answer, in language, to loss, and although it uses art as an expanded field, it is poetry that gives it all its movements, and light. Cartasquaisquer (Anyletters) is a series of interventions in the letters that my parents exchanged from 1950 to 1952, which I received after they died. After a while, this familiar universe crossed another. During a walking trip through the Brazilian backlands, I started a poetic barter experience with someone in prison, a political prisoner* − In order to open words, to open paths, gestures that make worlds move. The creative process started with the most archaic manual aspect, the weaving of the original letters; weaving an answer of my own, bringing temporalities disconnected of meaning closer, and making the non-semantic writing appear where words escape−one of the characteristics of this series. From the raw materiality, I traveled to virtual experiments: enlarging, reducing, and photocopying copies. Now the whole body is caught in the interventions and in the territory where erasure and chance court the imperceptible. A new dimension emerges, the failure of language. From material to virtual, from virtual to failure, from failure to the non-word, from emptiness to concreteness, the word-thing is the hot core of the experience.  yearnings Woven original letters 0.74 cm x 0.44 cm  uni verses Envelopes woven in copper wire over mirror 0.41 cm x 0.49 cm  I don't know how else to say it Human hair pressed onto merino wool 0.42 cm x 0.68 cm  quelêquelê: ponto feito Installation - mixed technique (side view) Four panels, 1.0 m x 1.5 m To walk on letters and different grounds, to have in the needle, thread, and dye the basis for a transcultural worldview, to compose and wear a cloak to celebrate the encounter with another in diversity is to give words a new tactile-sounding body, is to allow modulations to thoughts, and so perhaps this word-body will come to occupy the place of instanternity. *Jorge Augusto Xavier de Almeida, leader of grassroots movements, Black, poor, and from the Northeast region of Brazil, was in prison from 2016 to 2021. No evidence against him was presented.  Poetry Performance by Angela Quinto in Portuguese  OriOyá Buffalo horn and printed silk strips 0.37 cm x 1.5 m Used also as a costume for a performance Perdi minha língua no estrangeiro I lost my tongue abroad Translated by Lúcia Leão [1] “Ori” means “head” in Yoruba and “Oyá” is an Orisha, also known as Yansã. The silk strips have excerpts of the letters Angela’s mother, Irene, sent to Angela’s father. Angela is a daughter of Yansã, and here she mixes her biological mother and the Orisha. [2] cassofracasso – A play with sounds and meanings, mixing words such as “casso,” first-person present-tense of the verb “cassar” (to repeal, revoke) and “fracasso,” failure. The word “caço” that we also hear here, means “I hunt.” [3] Fogueiralta is a combination of two words, “fogueira” and “alta” – “bonfire” and “high.” Angela wrote this poem after she heard Camila, the daughter of Jorge Augusto Xavier de Almeida read her father’s letters, during Angela’s trip through the Brazilian backlands. Angela would later exchange letters with Jorge for five years. [4] quelêquelê: ponto feito – “Quelêquelê” is a word Angela created.”Ponto feito” is a “ebó,” an offering to a spiritual being. [5] Reerence to a song “Vela no Breu,” by Paulinho da Viola, a Brazilian guitarist, composer, and singer.  words-fish Raffia in copper wire over mirror 0.64 cm x 0.68 cm Guest Editor:
Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, and elsewhere. It is also included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia holds a master’s degree in Brazilian literature (UERJ–RJ, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism (University of Miami–FL, USA). She is a book reviewer for RHINO literary magazine, a volunteer copyeditor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and a board member for TCLA, a non-profit organization based in West Palm Beach, Florida. She has been living in South Florida for 30 years.  English & Spanish Editions I met a Chicago author with Guatemalan roots, Dennis Avelar, at the 51st Ward Books Festival, where celebrated multi-cultural and linguistical books for young readers.
"The Blue Q" was a fiction novel for young adults, though Avelar's cinematic story-telling made it enjoyable for all adults. The main character was a young boy who became a spiritual animal - - you'll know what I mean if you read this book - - wink, wink. I think that Avelar has two strengths: ONE, The ability to create highly detailed narratives (his film background may contribute to this); TWO, Great support on his book tours (from his family and friends). I met his family at the book festival. They were indeed supportive, gathering audiences and talking about "The Blue Q" and Guatemalan culture & history. Many writers may be shy when selling books themselves, but family support is very reassuring when close people excel at it. Recently, I went to Beth McDermott, "Figure 1" book release party. Her mother ordered cookies that were frosted with the cover of her book. Those little things were real encouraging to the writers present. Takashi Murakami, a Japanese contemporary artist, once said that writers & artists must sell their products to their parents & family first. If your family is convinced of your projects and purchase your works, your art is real. "I don’t know of anyone in the traditional publishing industry. I have no contacts, I know no agents, and I have no idea how to go from completed story to New York Times bestseller – but that doesn’t mean I will not do everything in my power to at least try." - - Dennis Avelar Here are three questions about Dennis Avelar's creative processes!  Dennis Avelar How did your family support your creative process?My family has never stopped supporting my creative process, though I have been challenged in many ways by them. Prior to writing “The Blue Q”, I studied and graduated with honors from Columbia College Chicago’s film and video program. Here I learned the fine art of filmmaking, which is a massive undertaking regardless of the scope of any project. Regardless of how thoughtfully diverse or just plain weird my ideas were, members of my family were eager to help me. My mother has always been my greatest fan, and my brothers have contributed wherever possible. My nieces and nephews have many times been my key actors and actresses. Even when I was working in a creative field on my own, I was fortunate in that I could lean on them for help when needed. In terms of being an author, my first presentation in Guatemala (for a book with a Guatemalan theme and protagonist) was done in front of my extended family, and they happily and proudly purchased copies of the book and asked for them to be signed and dedicated. My family in Guatemala helps me tremendously, and they continue to do so even when my requests are above-and-beyond. There are some members of my family who refuse to miss a single one of my presentations, and even if they are the only ones in the room for the presentation, it makes me smile to know they are there for me. That’s a dedication and commitment that has no value, yet means more to me than I can express through words. I can tell you a short story that recently occurred to me, which caught me by complete surprise. My nephew is currently a sophomore in high school, though he was a notoriously distracted child – very intelligent, but when he was younger his mind would travel to faraway lands while his teacher tried to get him to focus on something like spelling. He has always been a fun-loving kid, but now as he has grown older, his priorities have shifted. One of the ways in which he is more social is by talking more to others, and in a complete, uncommon characteristic, he is now even talking to girls his age. I have yet to confirm whether or not he is interested in a particular ‘friend’, but we’ll see what happens. I learned just yesterday that he asked and took this young woman as his date to homecoming over the weekend. Anyway, the friend that he may-or-may-not-have-a-crush-on had a birthday not too long ago. Now, having huge selection of options from which to choose for him to gift this young lady, my nephew choose to give her a copy of my novel. What’s more, he did not want it donated, but rather he used his own money to pay for a copy. I was shocked; not by the action, but by the gesture. The best gift a shy young man chose to give to his young crush for her birthday was a copy of his uncle’s novel, my novel! That is a compliment worth far more to me than any star-rating on any online network.  How did you find time to write such a long novel with your full-time job?It comes down to one word: perseverance. After some time, it became more about the story I wanted it to be than about the number of words or pages that were typed. But there is much more to it than just sitting down in front of my laptop and adding words to a blank document. The journey of “The Blue Q” began when I was approximately 9 years old. I vaguely remember the summer of 1992 as that was the year the Olympics were in Barcelona, Spain, and the first time professional basketball players were allowed to participate (being from Chicago, my family and I were BIG fans of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the Chicago Bulls). My family and I were in Guatemala at the time, so while I do not recall watching the events like we may have done back in Chicago, I do look back on that trip as the first I can recall of my visits to Guatemala. What I most remember is visiting a small town named Esquintla – which is approximately halfway between Guatemala City and the city of Mazatenango (where most of my family lives) – where we had ice cream under a large tree. My mother explained to me that the tree under which we found shade was actually a ceiba tree, which is the national tree of Guatemala, and that it was unique because of its roots, it’s bark, and the formation of its branches. I did not think much of it at the time, but I recall that tree in the town square. The only other aspect I recall about that trip to Guatemala was an interesting rock formation along the side of a busy, 2-lane road. It was a creation of art made of a few very large stones, slightly carved and then painted to look like a bird known as a quetzal. Now, I vaguely remember an uncle of mine pulling over the car and stopping briefly on the side of this narrow road to explain the quetzal to us. He explained that the quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and that it is a symbol of our people. I remember the impression that rock formation made on me, and despite it being noting more than a few painted stones - it was not nearly as massive in scale as Mount Rushmore or any number of rock carvings that are so prominent in the United States – the fact that this bird was important enough to be represented in this manner made a great impression on me.  Mi Quetzal Restaurant/JIREH GT Bakery in Bensenville, Illinois Time went on, years passed, and though I vaguely (though fondly) remembered that trip, new priorities came to light. Chicago continued to provide endless stories, but none were so prominent in my life than the (mis)adventures of my brother’s activities. He seemed to always find a way to get himself in trouble (or methods in which to get himself out of it), but no matter what he gave me the foundation for storytelling. One day, for reasons I have yet to understand, I took pen to paper and wrote a story about him. The short story became my very first, “My Big Brother”, which today is the standard by which I create my artistic universe; not because of its success nor its global appeal, but because it taught me about the power of the written word. “My Big Brother” was not published, was not entered in any competition nor was it memorable to anyone outside of my family. But to me, it became the foundation of what I wanted my future stories to become. At the age of twelve I learned that my father – a man who worked hard to provide for his family, even though doing so meant working the 2nd shift at a factory and missing a great portion of his children’s activities – took a copy of “My Big Brother” to work with him and would read it on particularly difficult days. The story would immediately change his outlook on work, and while it did not solve the problem (or lessen the work-related stressors), it enabled him briefly escape and find joy among a place of tension and pressure. The standard of my stories thus became to have a similar impact; to use words in a way in which people can escape, where readers can discover laughter or joy or drama, and be transported somewhere else entirely if even for a moment. It was at that age in which I told myself and my mother that I would one day write a book, even though I did not have the slightest idea of how to do it. But of course, at the age of twelve, the term “some day” could just as easily be a few weeks as much as it could be a few months. For me, that statement lasted two and a half decades. Twenty five years later, I had nothing but an extensive list of excuses as to why I had not achieved my goals – personally or professionally – and I found myself at the intersection of perhaps the darkest crossroad I hope to ever face in my life. I had lost myself along the trail of excuses, and I had little more than a long list of failures, experiences, and a few minor successes for which to draw upon. It was my mother who then reminded me of the promise I had made to her and to myself, and the process began as a subtle attempt to silence the voices that lingered austerely in my mind. But the challenge was not merely a creative one. I was forced to challenge every part of my being in every possible way. In order to help clear my mind, I first needed to clear my body of years of laziness. I began to walk – first just around the block, then at a nearby trail – which later became longer and longer distances. The days grew colder and shorter, though my running distances became longer. In the fall of 2018, I thought it would be highly unlikely that I would be accepted to participate in the 2019 Chicago Marathon, yet I chose to submit an application. As fate and luck would have it, I was selected as a participant, and so rigorous training became a part of my daily routine. Having my body burn thousands of calories on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis was by no means a simple task, though I found that my creativity flowed like a strong river as I ran on the woodland trails, or along bike paths, or anywhere I found it to be safe enough to run. Ice formed on the sides of my shoes, and while I was pushing the limits of my physicality, my mind thought of nothing but highly imaginative scenes of a story I was yet to draft. My body was exhausted, though my mind felt liberated, and I had yet one part of me that remained to be addressed. In an effort to not decline a sincere request from my sister, I attended a service at her church. I listened and felt something within me that needed to be reconnected to a greater source, and I found a passion that I thought had long since abandoned me. I found a purpose beyond hope, and despite my heavy training routine, I knew I did not want this to end. I expressed my gratitude for my life while on the elliptical. I found the joy of nature while running hundreds of miles back and forth along the Great Western Trail near my home. I discovered that I had yet to fulfill the promise I made to myself such a long time ago, and I had run out of reasons not to. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the entire process was getting started. Even after I had fully committed and decided to begin writing a story, any story, I had brought forth a list of reasons and excuses why it would not be done. Page one began as an attempt, but I had made it a strong point that this would only be a short story with no more than 10 pages and certainly not any chapters. Ten pages later, I found it to be exhilarating and liberating, but remained skeptical that it would become anything greater. I worked the courage to give myself more time and pages, resetting the limit from 10 to 25. I got to page 30, and learned more about the process than I ever knew to be possible. The new limit was re-reset from 25 pages to 50 pages, but that was the absolute maximum I would allow! I landed somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 pages before I realized how far the story had gone, and I had absolutely no intention of ending the progress I had made after weeks of writing. I loved the process so much, and each day brought forth new scenes and challenges that came to life with the magic of the written word. My daily schedule became as follows:
I stayed true to this same daily routine, minus a few changes on the weekends, for 10 months. I say this not to boast about my accomplishments, but rather to express what it took in order to transform 25 years of negating my own passion to produce something that would outlive me. I did not want to create just a story, but rather a memorable mission that would encapsulate the very core of my being and that could be used to create a positive impact for readers around the world. And so for those 10 months, I did not see it as putting myself through hell, but rather as a means of escaping from it. There is a strange correlation between training for a marathon and writing a novel, and I discovered a joy that far outweighs even the darkest, coldest nights I have ever experienced. I ran the 2019 Chicago Marathon in 4 hours and 24 minutes, and at exactly 400 typed pages, had finished the first draft of what became “The Blue Q: The World As I See It”. Both of these events happened around the same time, which I now see as ironic. Just as I had after completing the first draft of the story, I had one tough question to answer: now what? The response was to keep going. Surely there would be other marathons, but more importantly, there was a 400-page story to edit. The schedule persisted as best as I could manage, though it was altered in March of 2020 due to the pandemic. Unexpectedly, I hurt my knee as a result of over exerting myself, and while I may have temporarily put away my running shoes, my bike enabled me to greatly over-exceed the difference. I biked just shy of 4,000 miles that summer, and by the end of it, the book was completed. When I saw and held the book in my hand for the very first time, I became completely overwhelmed. It was an accomplishment that I never thought would see the light of day, and now it had a title, a beautiful cover, a mission, a purpose…and my name at the very top of it. I had to run hundreds of miles for months in order to draft that story. I had to bike thousands of miles in order to edit it. I had to invest countless hours in prayer, self-reflection, meditation, and self-help literature in order to be lifted to the point where I felt that I was worthy of my accomplishments. For me, I hope the process never ends. Though new challenges may be on the horizon, new chapters for the sequential books are already underway. I have learned to enjoy and appreciate each step as it represents a new word; each mile as it represents a new sentence; each tough training month as it represents a new chapter; and each achieved goal as means the story is further along. Though I may not win the race, I am in a far better place knowing that I at least got up and did my best. I recall that your English edition was self-published. What are the pros and cons about working through Amazon publishing?Well, I must start by saying a pro to one may just as easily be a con to someone else. My experience with being a self-published author is not the same as other authors. I found the Amazon process to be simple to navigate though oftentimes difficult to understand. Unless you know about the business (through school or self-research), it can be very daunting, intimidating, and confusing. Amazon does its best to explain the process to new self-publishers, but it is not as user-friendly as one would hope. Much of what I learned I gained through Google searches and through the kindness of strangers (many of which are on Reddit). It can be difficult to see your competition and see how success seems to come to so incredibly easy to some authors and writers, while I can go weeks without selling a single copy. That’s part of the game, and you must realize this prior to launching your work under the self-published title. It can also be disheartening to see how big of a percentage Amazon (and other retailers) take from each sale of your work, but that is part of the process. What I appreciate the most is the complete creative control I am given (via Amazon and other self-publishing networks) over my work. Just as an independent filmmaker has complete creative control over the vision of the film, so too does an independent author over their stories and characters. Amazon does not limit me on page numbers, or story content, or character names, or anything really. As long as I fit the dimensions of the print-size book I want, the rest is relatively simple. I have my own ISBN numbers, I have my own barcodes, I run my own websites, and I have entirely full control. On the other end of that, however, is that because I am on my own, I am solely responsible for the book’s performance. I have to be an author, a content developer, a web developer, a content writer, a photographer, a videographer, an editor, chief spokesman, legal officer, public relations manager, marketing and communications director, head of operations, accounts payable and receivable, and also the chief financial officer of the entire enterprise – not to mention social media specialist, travel manager, public speaker, and other duties as self-assigned. That might not be worth it to some, but for me, it is the best that I can do – and I truly appreciate all that I am learning because of it. I don’t know of anyone in the traditional publishing industry. I have no contacts, I know no agents, and I have no idea how to go from completed story to New York Times bestseller – but that doesn’t mean I will not do everything in my power to at least try. This is not in any way an attempt to discourage self-publishing, but rather a method in which I attempt to paint a more accurate portrait of my experiences. Here is a word of caution for anyone who wants to go it this endeavor solo: there are PLENTY of scammers out there waiting patiently for your money. These are difficult waters to navigate, and even after years of learning, I am nowhere near the level I want to be to say I am an expert at this. But I don’t have time to waste, as my story is not going to tell itself and will not find readers by just sitting in my mailbox or tucked away in a storage closet. If I have the opportunity to work with publishers in the future, I welcome the opportunity to do so, but if not, then at least I know I did my best in putting my work and my name out to the world.  Dennis Avelar’s mission to become a published author began while he was in middle school, where he developed a passion for telling compelling stories. Born and raised in and around the suburbs of Chicago, he drew inspiration from the people, places, events, and experiences he shared with friends and family.
As a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s film and video program, Dennis further developed his passion for storytelling by incorporating elements of cinema into the universes created by his mind. His lifelong goal remains the same as it was when he first sought to achieve it, and he hopes that the opportunity to help others with his words and writing continues to inspire his future works and stories. He currently resides in Addison, Illinois. Learn more about the author and view his other creative works at www.DennisAvelar.com.  With Lúcia Leão Working on Gallery does not have a new article this September; however, there are so many contents that you may enjoy reading and experiencing.
Working On Gallery Past Guest Lists Something is Going On This is a new blog where I showcase interviews and reviews outside of Working on Gallery. Graphic Poetry Study Guide Site Map of Study Guides WG Instagram  Angela Narciso Torres reads her newest book, "What Happens Is Neither". I was so happy to catch her before she took off for Los Angeles!
She educates me about poetry. She stands by me when I go through difficult times. She guides me as to what is life. I only met her briefly in Chicago, but I am such a lucky person to have our friendship grow over such distances, sometimes between Manila & Tokyo. Cheers for our friendship.  Today's guest is Virginia Bell!
She is our RHINO POETRY new leader who made sure that we survived the pandemic & will have more poetic moments with our local & international writers. When she read two poems at the University of Chicago, tornado warnings started blaring like crazy!! This portrait picture was taken just before the storm. (I love it!) We relocated to a safe area to finish the video recordings. First Poem: "Sallie Gardner (1878)", Published in Kettle Blue Review, 2018 Second Poem: "The Man Who Perfected the Disappearing Thumb Trick", Published in Cider Press Review, 2015  Congratulations, Beth McDermott!
Her first poetry full-length book, "Figure 1", has just come out from Pine Row Press, AND - - drumroll, please - - she is the new editor in chief at Cider Press Review! Please enjoy watching her reading on Instagram WG Channel.  I became familiar with Anne McGrath's works when I ran Working On Gallery's Instagram account. During the pandemic, she posted a piece every day -- some were black & white paintings, some were naturistic adaptations -- it became my morning routine to observe her art with a cup of coffee.
Today's process essay especially encourages me because I have been thinking of how much I have yet to achieve in creative writing. During the pandemic, I was really thankful and lucky to survive as a poet & artist. Though, I also realized that I was becoming a professional creator who has to be flexible under many circumstances. I likely burned out, because my mind told me, "I don't want to read or write in English anymore!" "Then the pandemic lock-down hit and I found myself at home with time and a small tray of my son’s leftover watercolors, crayons, and markers... At the risk of making a fool of myself I posted one of my creations on Instagram." I would like to express McGrath was a nonfiction writer. She started painting when the pandemic started about two years ago.
My past contributor, Luisa A. Igloria (the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia), also started creating three-dimensional art & writing pieces. Now she publishes her crafts. In addition, she is organizing a Poetry Postcard Project this National Poetry Month. I noticed more and more that writers jumped into different genres like paintings, playing music, practicing yoga... and many of them started new professions in addition to their existing writing careers. "At the risk of making a fool of myself..." What kind of risk can I take to further myself? I create graphic poems and play the piano. Why do I -- write in Japanese -- don't I? You may be thinking it is your native language! And you'd be right. But I have never seriously written stories in my mother-tongue. Now, I am writing something in Japanese everyday. This is how we -- writers -- keep building on our craft: at the risk of making fools of ourselves.  Art by Anne McGrath Essay by Anne McGrath Having been crushed by art teachers early in life, I was as frightened of drawing as I was of taking the math portion of the SATs. Humiliating attempts at making art had revealed my inability to create anything resembling anything I was aiming for. By the age of six I’d written an obituary for artistic endeavors. Then the pandemic lock-down hit and I found myself at home with time and a small tray of my son’s leftover watercolors, crayons, and markers. I started scribbling, collaging, and experimenting with mark making using bright colors and wild lines.  Instagram @theannemcgrath At the risk of making a fool of myself I posted one of my creations on Instagram. I connected with other artists and posted another, and another, and I have made and shared some form of art nearly every day for over two years now.  Photo by Anne McGrath I began trying every art form that caught my fancy. I hand-sewed textiles into little booklets made of scrap fabric and left them covered in dirt for months to deconstruct their surfaces. You never know what you’re going to get! I buried the one pictured above in the fall, dug it up in early spring, and washed it in a mudpuddle. It was underground through rain and snow and had delightful little squiggly marks on one page where a leggy bug had roamed through. The process was meditative and joyful, which is how I now think art making should be—full of wonder.  Art by Anne McGrath My pile of vintage books was perfect for making erasure poems. I was amazed when gorgeous literary journals like Thrush, The Indianapolis Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and The Ilanot Review agreed to publish them. I bought several Pilot Parallel pens and discovered the bliss of asemic writing—placing brush strokes on paper to form words without regard to logical language structure. It was thrilling to let my imagination run free and I had no problem looking beyond the illegibility of my writing to find beauty and inspiration. I was writing nonfiction before the pandemic but stopped to focus on worrying and am only now returning to a semi-regular writing process. My visual art practice—now mostly in black and white— has expanded the way I perceive the world and I’m hoping this shift will inform my writing. It’s easier for me to see value gradations in a limited palette and I want to approach words and sentences in a similar way, to keep things clean, to add wonder and meaning in layers.  Art by Anne McGrath I’ve learned that using a range of values—light, medium, and dark—makes my visual work more interesting. I can create an energetic mood using strong contrasts or I can create a sense of calm using more subtle variations. I want to bring these nuances and juxtapositions to what I write. Something as simple as using different values in a piece reveals visual texture and a sense of depth which can be used to lead the viewers eye around a canvas or a page of text. Depth and texture might be added to writing by alternating big and small voices and varying the lens from closeup to distanced. If I can pair down my palette and my expectations for my writing, be open to taking to risks as I did with my visual art, I think I’ll find more satisfaction in the process. Anne McGrath was noted in the 2020 Best American Essays series, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she was the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has work published or forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ruminate, Entropy, Columbia Journal, The Writer's Chronicle, and other journals.
 Today's Working On Gallery Instagram guest is Nan Cohen!
Her newest book, "Thousand-Year-Old Words", has just come out from Glass Lyre Press (Chicago local Publisher). She is currently a resident at the Ragdale Foundation. Please enjoy watching her reading on Instagram WG Channel.  First time I saw Francesca Preston's works was when she submitted her piece to RHINO Poetry. She added images to Luisa Caysedo-Kimura's poem, "Santa Rosa 2015" (RHINO Poetry, 2020). Her art was shared in RHINO Poetry Instagram.  RHINO Poetry Instagram @rhino_the_poetry_forum Later, we exchanged some letters and email, she told me of an article about Anselm Kiefer. I acknowledged him in my book, "GLYPH", because I created my very first graphic poetry sketch in front of his gigantic concrete pieces in North Adams, MA.
After I read the article (New York Times, Interview by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2020), Keifer reminded me of Professor Calculus from the Adventures of Tin Tin. Both are genius, but oddly strange -- perhaps, like movements of a pendulum. In case you are unfamiliar with his pendulum, you may visit this Q & A website about How does Professor Calculus's Pendulum work in Tintin? Yes, it is weird. I used a pendulum when I was sixteen in the countryside of Oregon. It was my first summer visiting the United States by myself without any English abilities. I was there as a part of school activities or sort. I knew that it was a pendulum (thanks to Processor Calculus), but I still did not know why a young Japanese girl with no English-speaking abilities ended up walking in circles with a pendulum in the middle of nowhere. Where does this pendulum keep guiding me? From Preston's picture (in the very end of her essay), there is a pendulum with Tony Himan, Water Witcher. I assumed that he used his pendulum to look for signs of water. "The question of whether water witching actually ‘works’ doesn’t interest me. I know it works, in the way that I know poetry works. What does interest me is how a poet, an artist, or a water witcher tunes their body to their craft. Writing a poem, like looking for underground water, is feeling for something you can’t see – a fluid source, a mystery that cannot be truly comprehended. But you can use that source, you can work with it." I wonder if my pendulum experience connected me with today's craft essay. My Language Wants to be Seen By Francesca Preston  Francesca Preston, "Impetus" I once spent time with a talented water witcher, a special man named Tony Himan. He’s gone now. He would be hired to dowse for peoples’ wells - still a common practice in the country. We stood together in the dry, rocky foothills of my grandmother’s land, and he showed me how he looked for water. On the surface it was simple – he was just holding a bit of dangling metal and walking around. Tony Himan was so good that he could tell not only where the water was, but how deep within ten feet, and what minerals were at certain layers: where salt, where iron. He was self-taught, and had spent years practicing in a big cardboard box out in the fields. He said it didn’t really matter what tool you used; in the end it was all about the relationship between your mind and your hand. You have to develop the rest of it. The question of whether water witching actually ‘works’ doesn’t interest me. I know it works, in the way that I know poetry works. What does interest me is how a poet, an artist, or a water witcher tunes their body to their craft. Writing a poem, like looking for underground water, is feeling for something you can’t see – a fluid source, a mystery that cannot be truly comprehended. But you can use that source, you can work with it. The comparison here is perhaps obvious. Word/image = water; writing/making art = tapping, listening, using your body and mind to locate, to place. But Tony Himan revealed something to me that I will never forget. He practiced in a cardboard box! The thought of him carrying an enormous cardboard box out into the fields, and sitting inside it while he concentrated with his mind, re-minds me of my childhood, and my inward-looking self. How the land tugged the fingers of his mind.  Bruce Nauman, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths" I grew up in the country on a dead-end road. It was eerily quiet, and we had few neighbors. I spent a lot of time by myself, reading, drawing, and fantasizing about making 3-D houses out of white paper. Every once in a while we’d go to San Francisco and my mother would take my sister and me to an art museum. Eventually I noticed something internal: when I’d look at a piece of art on the wall, I would feel an intense urge to read the title underneath it first, or at the same time. My eyes would flick back and forth, out of my control, and I often couldn’t settle down. But when I looked at pieces where image and word, art and text, were fused – as with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Bruce Nauman – I felt my body relax and a sort of ecstasy emerge. It continues to be this way for me. I have a presiding obsession with the relationship between words and images, and a desire to have them together. More specifically: to rejoin them where they have been broken apart, back to their birthplace in the earth itself. In working on this essay I realized yet again that my art is the pictographic version of my writing: symbols that circle back to what I’m tracking or constructing in the verbal realm. My art is writing too. When I encounter unnecessary jargon in the world – dead, technical language used to alienate people – I get really angry. This type of language refuses to allow images in the mind, which I believe are essential to live. My language wants to be seen.  Francesca Preston, "The Two Parts Fell Open" These are old, blacksmithed ice tongs from the ghost town where my mother grew up, and to which my Ligurian ancestors arrived in the 1800s. I have never used them. There is no longer a need to lift heavy blocks of ice – cut from a pond! – in order to keep food cool. But the iron object, which resembles scissors or birth forceps or talking snakes, gnaws on me with its enduring presence. Hefting chunks of a frozen ‘body of water’ in order to keep something (that will be consumed in short order) seems related somehow to the act of writing – from fluid to solid to fluid again. Catching a thought-form in the right state, working with it as fast as you can, and then letting it do its own thing. * During the pandemic I’ve started listening to people more, or rather overhearing them. Perhaps it’s that the opportunities for stranger-exchange are fewer, so I am alert to any stray gems. A couple weeks ago I heard teenagers in a cafe discussing the holidays, what gifts they’d received, and the topic of gift cards. I heard one say, My family’s so weird. I had a massive laugh inside when I heard this. I love that she used such specific words (for a teenager, particularly) to describe what she didn’t want: tangibility, specificity, the physical evidence of choice. And I realize that is exactly what I do want in my writing, and my art. I want to use mysterious means to pull tangible and specific things out of the ground: coins, parts of old tools, bits of dialect, other peoples’ dreams, neglected words, uneasy memories, anything ancient. My poems are often dark-humored. It is no surprise to me that ‘humor’ originally meant ‘bodily fluid.’ The inner syrup of not only humans, but animals and plants, occupies me.  "My father being followed by a bummer lamb; My mother with moss over her left eye" No matter what I think I want to write about, there is often my family in the way, like a cow standing in the road on a warm night. By ‘in the way’ I mean part of the way; they are part of my work. By the time I was 10, my mother had fully become a painter, and would leave cryptic notes to herself around the house, things like ‘tiny, squash-eared babies’ or ‘precarious’ written twice. There were always words in her paintings. She walked on them intermittently, and then left them on the floor, where I would come to stare as if they were lost siblings. My father was (is!) a rebellious farmer who started baking bread when I was a child. The images of dough being kneaded and allowed to rest are visceral for me: flour and bread enter my poems regularly, like a kind of ghost. In a recent piece for the Ekphrastic Review I found myself describing my great-great-grandmother’s face: moon-wide as bread / squashed into a suitcase. The polarity of dough-rising (roundly expansive) and the truncated form it must sometimes take (boxy, contained) feels like what her life must have been, in shifting from one place to the next. My desire to retrieve things applies to my poems themselves. I have a chapbook coming out, {If There Are Horns, to be published by Finishing Line Press} after 17 years of not sending out poetry. I wanted to honor these older poems, written as I was navigating within and away from my family, away from academia, away from this country, becoming lost in an important way, and then back finally to the land of my ancestors. I wanted to give them a home, a suitable container, after all these years.  Thank you to Tony Himan, Photograph by Maggie Preston Francesca Preston is a writer, artist, and editor based in Petaluma, California. She graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, and then dropped out of two MFA programs in her twenties. Her poetic works have been published or accepted by journals including Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, Crab Creek Review, Ekphrastic Review, Fence, Feral, MALUS, Phoebe, Walrus, and her essays by various magazines. The land she mentions in the essay, a ghost town called Calaveritas, is located in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Her chapbook If There Are Horns is forthcoming in fall of 2022.
Website: francescapreston.com  The first time I saw Kelsey Zimmerman's erasure poems at Indianapolis Review, I immediately contacted my dear friend Natalie Solmer, and I asked her to introduce Zimmerman. I sensed new elements of visual erasure poetry from her work, but I couldn't pinpoint exactly what they were. Her poetry erasure technique is similar to other erasure poets (erasing words from an intriguing original text), but something stood out and captured me. Coincidentally, this was around the same time I was discussing and observing erasure poems with students at Northen Iowa University. I eventually created a study guide for Visual Erasure Poetry, and in it I wrote Zimmerman has advanced versions of visual erasure poems that we were currently familiar with.  "Reliever" Kelsey Zimmerman, the Indianapolis Review I was glad that Zimmerman shared her creative process because it identified what I was seeing as new to visual erasure poems. Her work was indeed moving forward based on what we knew about visual poems - - she was inspired by many poets & artists such as Douglas Kearney, and then she created her erasure poems using new computer tools and existing photos that she took. Now, I understand how her vivid colors (she uses monotones, but those colors stand out) were adapted, and how she thoughtfully coordinated texts & images. There are new elements that uniquely signify her work. This is both unexpected and thrilling, and I seriously enjoy being in the front row of this visual poetry renaissance. YouTube by Douglas Kearney, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Octavio Quintanilla and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth. By Kelsey Zimmerman In March 2021, I attended an AWP session online that pushed me for the first time towards visual poetry. Compounding the Line: Visual Poetics in a Word Doc World with Douglas Kearney, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Octavio Quintanilla and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth. For some time, I’d been thinking about ways to integrate the photos I take with poetry and hadn’t been able to identify a method that didn’t feel tacky somehow—my worst fear was creating something that made someone think, “Looks like that was done in Canva!” But the examples of these amazing artists in this session reinvigorated this quest for me. Douglas Kearney shared a video of some of his process while working with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator that, in particular, opened my eyes to the possibilities there if I could improve my comfort with the software – I was a novice, but already comfortable with Adobe Lightroom Classic and InDesign. The cross-platform functionality of all Adobe programs is somewhat similar, and my knowledge of the latter provided a much-needed entry point. Around that time in March, I was also in a poetry workshop in my MFA program that centered on the performance of poetry, not just as it’s spoken aloud, but how it performs on the page. I began to integrate that idea into my “normal” poetry, but also began to spend much more time thinking about how visual elements could perform on the page and what exactly I wanted any visual poetry of mine to say. I also read Hotel Almighty by Sarah J. Sloat, which proved highly influential, and a friend introduced me to Nets by Jen Bervin, Emily Dickinson’s postcard poems, and several other books on the history of concrete and visual poetry, and explored the work of several small presses, Ugly Duckling Presse in particular (and UDP is now very high on my list of dream publishers, given the esteem in which I hold their work!). Another friend had worked with Katy Didden at Ball State as an undergraduate, and her Ore Choir was another inspiration. Trying to situate myself into the context of the arena I hoped to enter was both daunting and inspiring: there was my little myopic self, surprised on some level that so many other people had worked to solve this same problem, make art in this same vein. All their work proved to be instructive and inspirational.  "Dancer" Kelsey Zimmerman, the Indianapolis Review I often think of my creative process as a sort of machine, or maybe an animal, where I go through weeks or months of input input input input, voraciously reading and exposing myself to ideas, and at certain points I sit down and switch to output. So I had all these things floating through my brain and had some half-formed ideas floating around, and there was one thing on my brain that superseded most other thoughts, and those were thoughts on the pandemic. The idea for how I would make an erasure poem of poetry had come to me, but I had to have the right text and the right images. Luckily, I already had a catalog of thousands of my own photographs to choose from. But for those initial text scans, I turned to archive.org and searched “pandemic.” That’s how I found the text for these works in The Indianapolis Review. A small tome, digitized in the infernal magic of the internet, on the 1918 flu response and vaccination, in the public domain on the Internet Archive. As far as page selection goes, I choose the ones I make erasures from more or less at random: I do scan the page for content, looking for words I think I can work from, words that interest me and spark something – I also especially like pages with ornamental designs (such as chapter openings in some books) and lots of white space (such as on chapter-ending pages). These allow for an extra dimensionality, another way of letting the original work speak for itself and highlighting what it says in a new way. The examples of my work in The Indianapolis Review are from the very first time I sat down to ever seriously try to create something like this. It’s fascinating to look back because, while I still like them, there are definitely things I’d do differently now – especially when it comes to figuring out ways to make the text flow more easily and stand out -- though in these pieces that the text and imagery battle for first relevance is a feature, not a bug. There are thousands of photographs in my catalog, and after skimming a page I’d picked to be an erasure, I comb through all those photos for one that seems like it would capture the right mood. From there, it’s all listening to the combination of words and image within the project, letting the final form reveal itself. Since March I’ve found it’s extremely difficult to find high-quality scans online, even on websites like archive.org or Project Gutenburg. Or if you can find them, they sometimes have restrictions associated with the file types or the scan quality as low. I take my own scans now, with books of my own or interesting ones I find at estate sales or thrift stores. In the meantime, I’m continuing to make more erasures in this vein, but am also always trying to think of what to do next. There’s always some boundary to be broken. Kelsey Zimmerman is a writer and visual artist from Michigan currently living in Iowa. A 2021 Best of the Net nominee, her work is published or forthcoming in Hobart, The Indianapolis Review, Nurture: A Literary Journal, and Ghost City Review. You can find her on the web at www.kelseyzimmerman.com or on Twitter @kelseypz.
It was an interesting coincidence that Leão talks about Yukio Ninagawa, a Japanese theater & movie director, in her essay.
Recently, one of Ninagawa's productions had its final show. He created Saitama Gold Theater with only actors who were over fifty-five years old. Due to the pandemic and declining number of performers over recent years, the company officially closed. Ninagawa is best known for adapting Shakespear plays into Japanese and fusion cultures. Here is one example on YouTube of his production of Hamlet. There are translations in Chinese and English; however, the actors perform in Japanese. Their stage sets and costumes are deeply influenced by Japanese traditions.
The majority of Japanese people were not familiar with Shakespear until Tsubouchi Shōyō translated all the collections from 1909 - 1930. Some of his translations have free online archives available at Aozora Bunko. So in Japan, Shakespear is considered "new" reading. Many people do not have the opportunity to read Shakespear in its original English, but they seek life answers from translations. I also did not know that Tsubouchi spent his childhood in Nagoya, my home city. (Borrowing Leão's words, I had never researched - - until now.) In addition, he was one of the first to highlight the differences between European and Japanese writing styles. He explained European key writers such as Homer and Dante. Tsubouchi also wrote a textbook of English Literature 101 contrasted with Japanese writing history. "I had never researched - - until now..." This is what I want to achieve with Working on Gallery. A curious dot guides the us to unknown, large reflections. I met Lúcia Leão in Miami when SWWIM hosted their monthly poetry reading event at the Betsy. She helped me order a magically tiny emerald-like key-lime pie and a small porcelain cup of coffee in Little Havana. I indeed felt like Alice in Wonderland. There, people often speak both Spanish and English, switching flawlessly between each. I witnessed how Leão's writing reflects this fusion culture.  This w-place By Lúcia Leão I often feel that writing poems takes me to the theatre. The morning I was imagining this piece, one image caught me. It had been laying on top of a chest of drawers in my bedroom for years. It would not leave me. My eyes traveling around it, thinking − Graphic? Appealing? Flowing red strips made of silk, so scarlet I had to look for wounds. It seemed it was not by chance that the mouth and the hands exposed the hurt. Places of words and writing. Eyes facing grief.  Directed by Yukio Ninagawa, Photo by Ellie Kurttz Trying – able? – to stay with the movements of meanings. The photo is on the cover of a book. It is from a Japanese production of Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Yukio Ninagawa, designed by Tsukasa Nagagoshi, Royal Shakespeare Company, 2006.  This is Titu’s daughter, Lavinia. She suffered a kind of violence we can and cannot absorb from this picture. Blood has been replaced by silk, to soften the horror, to increase it. My mind recalls Artaud and traps me there. Where to go with this? The page as the stage. A flow of words being held and escaping. A corridor opening to many. I am still looking at the picture, my eyes in a curious fashion, with hers. There is no tongue. There are no fingers. I am an explorer. It is a tragedy. And this, not an exit sign:  A name under Shakespeare not familiar to me. But of course, the photographer is Brazilian. My roots not a point of departure but of a meeting. She lives in London, not in Brazil. The traveling eyes and the traveling mind continue. It was in a bookstore in Rio de Janeiro that a friend and I got together, both by then foreigners in our city of origin, drunk on the joy an antique friendship releases. About to leave, she bought me the book, gift-wrapped it. The cover a postcard I kept of a time, of the craft of theater. I had never researched the photographer or the stage designer, until now. London, Rio, Japan, the places where I am – restart and mix. Pain, cruelty, hatred, and love – subtitles that move. They walk on the surface where the names stay. This is more than a postcard. But the leap to graphic poetry seems to be missing. In the play, Lavinia is able to grab a staff, put it in her mouth, and write on the sand the names of the people who had harmed her. There is a deeper wound the photo doesn’t show. While approaching this frame, I was drawing myself close in the process of her, sentences brushing against sensations, opening air. Papery silky strips in this  w-place. The leap missing. But first we circle, select, gather, leave behind pieces. Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her
poems have been published in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, among others. Her work is included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, edited by Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro, Nikki Moustaki and Elisa Albo. Lúcia has been living in Florida for twenty-five years.  Photo by Layne Dixon I met Claire Bauman at Enrich Chicago workshops, where we learned how to update ourselves for an anti-racism initiative in Chicago art professions. We had the opportunity to learn about each other (she knits for her family members!) and I was interested in knowing more about her theatre directing along with her ballet and dancing experiences. "Just technique is stiff and academic. Expression alone is chaotic. But, together, they are exquisite." Bauman compares her art theory with "form" and "structure". I think that if dancing is cooking, "form" is the ingredients (pumpkin, flour, & spices...) and "structure" is the recipe. What can we cook with pumpkins, flour, & spices? Pumpkin pie? Or Pumpkin tempura? With the same ingredients, the outcomes can vary depending on how we approach them. The performer takes their ingredients (emotions, academia, & experience), and uses them in a performance flavored with the nuances of how each were prepared. The outcome becomes a tragedy or comedy. Her conversation reminded me of my recent Instagram TV guest, Jen Karetnick, who said, "Everyone gets the same ingredients & recipes, but the cook must tweak it for the best taste. It is same as writing poetry". "It may be easy to write off an arm gesture as icing on the cake, but I see such movement as an inextricable aspect of choreography that transforms simple dance steps into a form that can be manipulated to carry meaning." Bauman is my first guest outside the writing community. But I love to realize again how art and creativity connect different professions.  Claire, as a Munchkin, with her first ballet teacher in her first-ever performance, "The Wizard of Oz", in 1996. PERSONAL MUSINGS ON FORM AND STRUCTURE By Claire Bauman (she/her/hers) Every ballet class begins with pliés. As the knees bend to a demi plié, the arms float to first position, and the head tilts, gazing at the palm. As the knees extend, arms open to second position, and the head follows the hand out. This exercise not only begins class, but also forms the foundation of most balletic movement. But it is not just the mechanics of the movement that matter. The épaulment, or positioning of the shoulders, head, and neck, and the quality of the movement are essential in creating subtle, twisting lines, a sense of effortlessness and grace, and depth of emotion in any movement. Moments like the Black Swan’s 36 fouettes are easily memorable and spectacular even, but what is Swan Lake without the iconic floating, beating arms of the swan corps de ballet? It may be easy to write off an arm gesture as icing on the cake, but I see such movement as an inextricable aspect of choreography that transforms simple dance steps into a form that can be manipulated to carry meaning. My interest in theatre began with ballet. The story goes that I begged my mom to allow me to take extra ballet classes in preparation for the annual exam required to pass on to the next level of training when I was in kindergarten. Throughout my childhood, my teachers taught me to point my feet properly through reminders to avoid “dead fish,” to expand and lift through my chest by feeling the sun shining onto it, and to elongate through my neck by imagining myself wearing a crown. This imagery allowed me to tap into the creative and emotional qualities of ballet. I didn’t have the highest grand battements or the most pirouettes, but I stuck with ballet for as long as I did because the rigor of the technique gave me an emotional outlet to explore storytelling. I loved both the technique and the expression because they needed each other to be a complete artistic form. Just technique is stiff and academic. Expression alone is chaotic. But, together, they are exquisite.  Photo by Nate Bartlett I would not work the way I do as a theatre maker if not for ballet. Whether I am directing, devising, or choreographing, I seek to create meaning through form: the shape, appearance, or quality of something. I build images, metaphor, and juxtaposition to construct meaning and evoke visceral responses in audiences. If form is the essential construction of an entity, I believe those inherent qualities can elicit emotion. Let’s return to the ballet. Throughout Act II of Giselle, it’s a common stylistic, or formal choice, that Giselle and the Willis (maidens who have died before their wedding day) dance with their eyes downcast. The eyes downcast is part of the form of the steps for these characters, creating an eerie aura of grief. The Willis would not be half as powerful without this choice. I do not think form is synonymous with structure (the organization of things). But structure is an important component in creating meaning, and another study ingrained this perspective in me. I chose to take Latin in high school (following after my brother). I loved it because it also uses form and structure to create meaning; in this case, through cases (pardon the pun). Cases are like verb conjugations but for nouns and adjectives. Latin uses cases because it does not require word order. So the ending of the word tied it to other words rather than its location in a sentence. And by changing the case, you change the form, and therefore, the meaning of the word. With a different case, the word “painting” becomes “to the painting” or “of the painting.” Words and their cases could have their meaning further manipulated through rhetorical devices. This leads us from form to structure, from the manipulation of the thing itself (words, in this example) to the manipulation of their organization. Rhetorical devices are the structures that elevate language into poetry, layering a visual and auditory meaning onto the simple definitions of the words. Alliteration is a good example, since we also use it in English, and such repetition of consonant sounds can add to an emotional response. Because of the use of cases and the fluidity with which words could be placed in a sentence, Latin gave us other devices like chiasmus, a mirroring device that placed words in an “a b b a” pattern. Another favorite is caesura, a word break in a phrase. This makes Latin poetry even more powerful through its visual structure.  Photo by Claire Bauman A rehearsal photo from "The Grandmothers", a devised dance theatre piece. I fixate on form and structure in theatre because I think they are often overlooked as the containers of meaning which can evoke emotion in an audience. And form and structure are a choice. Choice is where my artist perspective and inquiry emerge from. So often, in art and society, we forget that everything is constructed, and anything that is built can be built anew through different choices. Antonin Artaud hones in on the power of theatre to challenge social inequity in his essays collected in Theatre and Its Double. He laments that, “our theatre never goes so far as to ask whether this social and moral system might not by chance be iniquitous.” I want theatre to be more than just a story that happens onstage. Form can evoke a reaction more powerful and subliminal within an audience than the combined definitions of words spoken by a character that feels relatable. I hope such an emotional connection can challenge how people view themselves in space and in society. I deeply believe that movement, form, and structure hold the power to change systems and people and that theatre is an essential tool in imagining and creating such change. Claire Bauman a director and choreographer who creates theatre, dance theatre, and performance art through devising practices and ensemble-based collaboration. She approaches her self-produced and devised work with an interdisciplinary and feminist lense. She has worked with Red Tape Theatre, Interrobang Theatre Project, Walkabout Theater, Rhinofest, Broken Nose Collective, and Chicago Theatre Marathon. She is the Grants Manager and an ensemble member with Red Tape Theatre and an Institutional Giving Consultant with Artistic Fundraising Group. Claire has participated in DirectorsLabChicago, Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Observership Program, and Hangar Theatre's Directing Apprenticeship. She graduated from Vassar College and further trained at the Moscow Art Theater School.
 Glenore Dallenbach was Ann Hudson's great-grandmother. Here’s a photo of her at age 19, beside the Balanced Rock in Colorado. The photo is dated 1904. We think what we can't see can't hurt us. I met Ann Hudson when I joined RHINO Poetry in 2016. She pays meticulous attention to everything; especially to identify side-stories in our submission reading process. In other words, our editors are often convinced to reconsider poems nearly rejected after hearing her unique interpretation of them.
Her new book, "Glow" (Next Page, 2021) has just released. The opening reading event will be hosted by the press on October 26. This collection entangles her family, Marie Curie's discovery, and girls in the Radium Dial Company. The narrative bounces between science and history. The Radium Dial Company opened a factory in Ottawa, Illinois in 1922 to be close to Westclox, major clock manufacturing company in the area. Radium Dial hired young women to paint watch faces with luminescent paint; they were ideally suited for this work, it was believed, because of their fine motor skills and attention to details. They were explicitly taught to press the paintbrush between their lips to get the brush tip to the finest point possible. In doing so, they ingested radioactive paint, which managers assured them was safe This book is one only Ann Hudson can pull off. The language is beautifully tragic. Today, Hudson shares her zuihitsu-like-list essay (her essay reminds me of Sei Shōnagon's "Hateful Things") showcasing the story behind her new book, "GLOW". Ann Hudson, Glow 88 Pretty Much True Facts
 9. John Dean Caton, exhausted by overwork, moved from Chicago to Ottawa in 1838. He farmed for a few years before returning to the law. 10. In 1849 he helped establish the Illinois and Mississippi Telegraph Company, and 18 years later, sold to Western Union. 11. We spent a weekend at Starved Rock State Park, just outside Ottawa. My favorite spot is Council Overhang.  13. One afternoon we visited the nearby Ottawa Scouting and Historical Museum, where Mollie Perrot, local historian and JDC enthusiast, agreed to meet with me. She was excited to meet a Caton descendant. I was excited to see his giant, honorary hat outside the museum.  15. The kids were restless. On our way to get ice cream, we found the statue to the Radium Girls. I’d known it was nearby, but wasn’t looking closely for it.  17. It’s an odd, sad statue. The “girl” in question was likely in her late teens or early 20s, though there’s something about this statue that makes her look considerably younger. 18. The tulip in her right hand sags: defeated, deflated. It’s flaccid. It’s uncomfortable, no matter how you think about it.  20. By the time I got home to Chicago, I was more curious about the Radium Girls than JDC. I didn’t have any intention of writing poems about them. 21. I think “Work (1922)” and “Work (1923)” were the first poems I drafted, intending to leave it at that. 22. 88 is the atomic number of radium. 23. Marie Curie discovered radium. 24. Which makes it sound like she was digging through an attic and found it in an old box. Or she dug it up like a fossil. 25. No. She guessed it was there. She worked in foul conditions, laboring with the heavy materials, tending to a cauldron of what I imagine to be foul-smelling pitchblende she’d somehow finagled to be shipped to her from what is now the Czech Republic. 26. Pierre was interested and supportive. Marie did most of the heavy lifting. 27. At the time she didn’t get her share of the credit. 28. That’s my grandfather’s watch on the floor. It tells time, but it doesn’t glow.  30. My grandfather was JDC’s great-great-nephew. JDC died in 1885, 24 years before my grandfather was born. 31. There are a zillion Johns, Charleses, and Williams on that side of the family. It makes research confusing. 32. Maybe you’re still thinking of that limp tulip. 33. It’s odd to think we vacationed in an EPA Superfund site. 34. The Cleanups in My Community map is pretty sobering. 35. Marie Curie’s cookbooks are kept in a lead-lined vault. If you want to visit them you have to sign a release form. 36. Loie Fuller’s birth name was Mary-Louise Fuller. She was born in what is now Hinsdale, a western suburb of Chicago. 37. I haven’t found Fuller’s Radium Dance on film, but you can see her Serpentine Dance and get a feel for what she was up to. 38. It makes me think of ribbon gymnastics. 39. Fiesta dishware had uranium in its glaze; red was the most radioactive. 40. Fiestaware remains highly collectible. 41. There were casinos where you could play roulette in the dark. The ball and roulette wheel were painted with radium. 42. A musical number called “The Radium Dance” was written for a Broadway musical called Piff, Paff, Pouf, which is pretty mystifying in its own right. 43. One brand name for luminescent paint was Undark. 44. The Radium Girls weren’t just in Ottawa, IL; there were other factories in New Jersey and Connecticut. 45. One bite from a radioactive spider changed Peter Parker forever. But no bad side effects, not even a headache, and he gets the girl. 46. Necrosis: the death of all or most of the cells in an organ or tissue due to disease, injury, or failure of the blood supply. From Greek nekros = corpse. 47. Body burden: the concentration of chemical in the body at any given time. 48. Until the 1970s shoe stores would x-ray your feet to ensure a proper fitting shoe. 49. In 1998 the US FDA declared Mercurochrome as unsafe. 50. Marie Curie’s niece, Helena, was known as Hela. She died by her own hand in Chicago in 1921 at the age of 29. 51. Curiously, scientists refer to the oldest and most commonly used human cell line as HeLa, after Henrietta Lacks, from whom the cells were stolen. 52. A 1933 article in the American Journal of Public Health opens with the paragraph: “The excitement caused by the poisoning, or alleged poisoning, of a number of women engaged in applying a radium compound to watch hands and dials is well remembered. We understand the company was very liberal to the victims, and that new methods have been insisted upon which obviate the danger.”[i] [i]“RADIUM POISONING”, American Journal of Public Health 23, no. 4 (April 1, 1933): pp. 350-351. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.23.4.350 53. After the Radium Dial factory closed down, it reopened a few blocks away under a new name: Luminous Processes. 54. Luminous Processes. Shining Procedures. Glowing Practice. Shimmering Exercise. Radiant Problem. 55. Marie Curie also discovered polonium, which she named after her country of origin, Poland. 56. Peg Looney started working at Radium Dial when she was 17. She made good money: $17.50 a week. She died on August 14, 1929, at the age of 24. The causes of death listed on her death certificate were diphtheria and anemia. 57. Radium can also be instrumental in treating certain cancers. 58. Dial painters were paid eight cents per dial. The faster they painted, the more money they made. They were taught to pinch the tip of their camel-hair brushes between their lips to create a fine point. 59. Chemists at the factory operated behind lead screens. They used tongs. They wore masks. 60. Starved Rock State Park is on land once inhabited by Hopewellian, Woodland, and Mississippian tribes. From the 1500s to the 1700s, it was the land of the Illiniwek. 61. According to legend, Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribe was killed by an Illiniwek warrior during a tribal council. During a battle to avenge his killing, the Illiniwek wound up trapped on a cliff overlooking the Illinois River. The Ottawa and Potawatomi surrounded the bluff, but the Illiniwek refused to leave, and many starved to death, giving the area its name. 62. There’s no evidence that suggests this story is true, but it’s so widely disseminated most people take it to be true. 63. John Dean Caton recounted the story during an address to the Chicago Historical Society on December 13, 1870. 64. JDC also turned his attention to studying the natural world. He sent Charles Darwin a copy of a book he wrote on antelope and deer; Darwin sent a gracious thanks, and artfully avoids mentioning whether he plans to read the book. 65. Ottawa has a lot of large, vibrant murals that celebrate its history.  67. The high-quality silica sand in Ottawa is mined to make glass. One newspaper article called it “hypermining.” Turns out it’s not just good for glass; hydrofracking operations use this high-end sand to “prop open cracks in deep underground shale deposits, allowing natural gas to flow freely toward the surface.” [i]The sand is rare, and plentiful in the region. Intense sand mining is putting the local ecology in danger. [i] Dan Ferber, “Scenic state park at center of Illinois frac sand fight,” Midwest Energy News, 6/4/12, https://energynews.us/2012/06/04/state-park-at-center-of-illinois-frac-sand-figh/ 68. The Peltier Glass Company in Ottawa used to produce marbles.   71. William Penn Caton married Elizabeth Steele. They had six children (one John, one William, one Charles, by the way.) 72. Charles Caton married Fannie Hull. They had seven children (including a William and a Charles.) 73. THAT William Caton married Glenore Dallenbach. Here’s a photo of her at age 19, beside the Balanced Rock in Colorado. The photo is dated 1904.  75. She lived to be 100 years old. 76. Glenore had a life-sized doll at the top of her stairs. It scared me and I ran past it. 77. Glenore was my great-grandmother. 78. Glenore’s husband (William, of course) disappeared in 1912. He boarded a train to work and was never heard from again. 79. There’s a glass blowing shop in Ottawa where you can get your loved one’s cremation ashes turned into a paperweight. 80. JDC is buried in the same Ottawa cemetery as William Dickson Boyce, who founded the Boy Scouts in 1910. With the exception of Mollie Perrot, folks in Ottawa seem much more interested in Boyce than JDC.  82. When he lived in Chicago, JDC had a big house on Calumet Ave. Family rumor had it that there was a tunnel of some sort that led from his house to another house. 83. I looked it up in the Chicago History Museum archives. Turns out JDC’s son, Arthur J Caton, was married to Delia Spencer. After Arthur Caton died, suddenly and unexpectedly, Delia married her neighbor Marshall Field, founder of the famous store that bears his name. The tunnel rumor made it to print, with the implication that Delia and Marshall were using it to tryst. 84. So that clock on the corner of State and Washington is in my family. Pretty much. Actually, there are two clocks: one at the SW corner of the building and one at the NW corner.  86. Marshall Fields went bankrupt years and years ago. Its flagship store is now owned by Macy’s. 87. But the clocks are still there. 88. And they still tell the time.  Ann Hudson (she/her) is the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press); a chapbook about radium, Glow, has just been released from Next Page Press. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor for RHINO, and teaches at a Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois.
  Miami-based poet and writer Jen Karetnick is the author/co-author of 20 books, including the cookbooks Mango and Ice Cube Tray Recipes. Her food, health, and lifestyle pieces appear recently in Allrecipes.com, Business Insider/Insider, The Counter, Indulge Magazine, NPR, Shondaland, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com for more or find her on Instagram @JenKaretnick and Twitter @Kavetchnik.
 "How do we articulate these feelings and this new way of experiencing the world so that we can communicate it?" When I read Tanja Softić's essay, I realized that my experience being a foreigner in the U.S. may actually be beneficial for the first time. That was really surprising when I thought about it. Often people talk about the disadvantages of being an Asian women or immigrant in the U.S.
"These days, we have all become immigrants: we can clearly see the destruction of life on the planet that is our home, by the forces that seem overwhelming." Indeed, in this dramatically evolving society -- tremendous technological developments & our short attention span with longer life span -- how we find who we are and how do we adapt new methods into our old habits to create a better society? Immigrants who experience multiple cultural backgrounds have experience with this process, because for them, adapting to American life means they have built new life methods onto their comfortable, familiar foundations. In other words, immigrants are really ready for this future normal. Therefore, I understand why Softić introduces Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (American anthropologist) and Lebbeus Woods (American architect) the way they did. Tsing sees human community as a fungal network, and Woods observes how we make homes by adding new material to distorted buildings after wars. Artists often find an idea from unrelated things. Artists are scholars, like Isaac Newton who compared a falling apple with the moon and crafted the theory of gravity. Softić is masterful at connecting those dots -- disintegration of her native country of Yugoslavia, Japanese-washi-paper, Covid-19, American social issues, chicken foot in a street drain -- to create her visual masterpieces.  "A Sound Like a Mighty Rushing Wind 2020" etching, photopolymer etching, chiyogami and digital print collage 16"x 47" 41 cm x 104 cm Tanja Softić Landscapes for the Last Century My visual art work combines the media of printmaking, drawing, photography and collage. I started writing poetry in my mid-forties. I should probably say “again and, this time, in English” because I used to write it in my youth, in Serbo-Croatian. Depending on who you talk to, this language is now called Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian or Montenegrin—I choose to stick to the nomenclature of my school days. An immigrant to the United States from Bosnia and Herzegovina, I have been working with the ideas of memory and migration for about twenty years. When I came to US in 1989 for what I thought was a three-year graduate program, I came from the country called Yugoslavia. So, while I am fascinated by questions of cultural identity or cultural belonging on an intellectual level, I have a personal experience of what Edward Said called the contrapuntal reality of an exile: I have transitioned through three citizenships in addition to one period of being a citizen of no country. In both my new and old homelands, outdated notions of national and ethnic identity and belonging continue to shape the politics and the society. Unlike many people affected by the current pandemic, by storms, fires and crop failures due to climate change, by capitalist boom and bust economies, I have had a privilege of having the safe, creative haven to process the events, record my thoughts and make work that is informed by the situation. Perhaps this privilege is not something that I would have noted some decades ago, but I am acutely aware of it now, and I am grateful for that awareness and sobered by it. Thinking about death, survival and their meaning in the larger cultural and ecological contexts and witnessing what may be the first death throes of the neoliberal world order, I have been working on Plague Diary, an ongoing series of collages on small sheets of kozo paper. The shapes I kept coming back to either embodied nature's ever-adapting ways of insuring survival, or cartoony visualizations of disaster.  "Excerpts from Plague Diary 2020" collage, photopolymer etching, digital print, ink, pencil 7.5" x 7.5" 19x19 cm These days, we have all become immigrants: we can clearly see the destruction of life on the planet that is our home, by the forces that seem overwhelming. Each action we take and every contemplation of the natural world is tinged with sense of loss of our world as we know it and knowledge of how much we are losing every day to the climate change. How many autumns do we have left to observe the splendor of of turning leaves? How many species will disappear this year? How long before homes of millions of people and the territories of entire nations become submerged under rising waters? There is a sense of anger, despair and even helplessness in the face of inaction of world leaders. How do we articulate these feelings and this new way of experiencing the world so that we can communicate it? And how do we turn them into something actually useful, a new, creative way of looking at and reorganizing the world? Dreaming of the perfect past and simpler world is tempting, but it is fanciful: exactly whose simple past are we talking about? It is also useless. What if we learned to think about the loss not with nostalgia and mimicry, but aiming to understand the forces that shaped the culture and society then, in order to understand the inertia and fear that prevents us from seeing the value of alternative views or solutions to existential problems we are facing? The processes used for creating images for Plague Diary and my larger works on paper, involve material labors of walking, collecting, repairing, cutting, transforming and connecting, generally speaking. Specifically, I travel, hike and explore memory sites in order to create photographic material, I create photopolymer etchings from my photographs, I collect biological illustration, elevation maps, things like visualizations of meteorological data or geophysical forces, I cut and reassemble photographs and found images into collage works that are then further developed in drawing, print and collage. Almost always, I work on Washi--Japanese paper-- because it will hold the most delicate drypoint or aquatint mark as well as the densest mezzotint. In drawing, I use it for its versatility and its strength. Because of the length of the fiber, Japanese paper will endure the handling and folding that would turn any Western paper into a pulp.  Plague Diary 2020 The processes themselves, the physicality of paper and drawing media, writing poetry, the visual sources I use all inform these works. While my poetic text is not obviously embedded into images, there is a vital connection, a symbiotic relationship between them: either the images generate poetry or the poem-writing provides insights that guides me in developing visual works. Night Blooms series of collage prints, for example, has been developed at the same time as some of my “Sarajevo poems”, such as Sarajevo Parataxis. Photographs of memory places interact with other elements (parts of old prints, traffic signage, photographs of mushrooms) in a visual, semiotic and lyrical ways: The city has a color in a way  "Night Blooms: Sky 2019" photogravure, aquatint, chine-collé, digital print 12"x24"/ 31x62 cm I aim to create landscapes for 21st century, include the loss, displacement and impermanence, but include hope as well. The works are unsettled and without the center because they investigate the world without center, without solid ground, without permanence in the lives of increasing part of humanity. My graphic interventions on top of the larger backgrounds are a conversation with that reality, they are investigations of our priorities and they contemplate new ways of living, valuing and thinking in this new, rapidly changing world. My visual work is also informed by the artist book formats I have observed and created, multi-channel video installations and other strategies to disrupt and alter the expected narrative. It is built as a result of digging into my own archives of photographs of mushrooms, invasive plants, memory places in Sarajevo and elsewhere, illustrations, decorative patterns, diagrams, maps, medical illustrations, microscopic imagery etc. Ultimately, this new work comes from what has been the impetus behind much of my art and writing: what is it that emerges as fertile, as full of possibility when we look back at life and culture that has been lost. How can we recognize seeds of renewal in the midst of unfolding disaster? For a couple of years, I have been working with images of mushrooms and invasive plants, incorporating them into my work as signifiers of the strangeness and interconnectedness of life and unexpected growth in unlikely places, as well as metaphors for displacement, migration, and assimilation.  A “collage staging wall” in Tanja Softić's studio Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, raises questions and offers ideas about sustainable life in the precarity of the Anthropocene through many distinct ways of looking at a species of mushroom, tricholoma matsutake: its biological symbiotic relationships, its role in processes of reforestation after disasters or logging, its vast underground fungal network, the communities and fringe economies it makes through foraging, trade, and global supply chains.(i) If I had to describe Tsing’s book in the ways one would describe a painting, I would call it a brilliant collage that plays with the notions of perspective that reveal not just deep mastery of it but also the need to escape perspective’s dictates and enter other means of envisioning pictorial space and what it is supposed to hold: “Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily, there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations.”(ii) Another of my influences is the late visionary architect and artist Lebbeus Woods. In his book War and Architecture,(iii) he uses the term “scab structures” to refer to additive repairs to a broken building that call attention to war trauma and serve a distinct purpose, enabling new forms of habitation while witnessing the processes of destruction and repair. In terms strikingly similar to Tsing’s, Woods not only offers critique of capitalist architectural and urban planning practices that are based on the concealment of trauma and brokenness but also offers a vision of the more complex, more collaborative world in the aftermath of war or a natural disaster. “Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.” Both Tsing and Woods visualize a habitable, sustainable communal world where brokenness is acknowledged, openly mourned, and woven into the landscape. We build upon the past, they acknowledge, but they warn us that nostalgia, sentimentality, ideas of “innocence” of past cultures and societies are slippery grounds to build upon. Preservation of memory without resorting to outdating solutions and concepts is possible: attention, as Simone Weil has said, is a form of prayer. And I would add, is the beginning of understanding, conversation and action. As an artist, I am hearing both Tsing and Woods inviting me to practice attentive, creative openness to a shifting terrain and its surprises—not unlike the kind of awareness one would need to forage for mushrooms, cross the sea to uncertainty in a flimsy boat, or set up home in the ruins. That is where the hope is. And that is how I hope to create the landscapes and portraits of precarious world-- decentered, polyphonic, surprising. If we listen, carefully, to the stories of migrants, exiles, and refugees, not only for the sake of exercising our compassion but in order to learn ways of coping and rapidly evolving by witnessing the unthinkable. Popular culture is replete with figures of tough lone survivors in a postapocalyptic world, with a gun and a supply of food cans. Actual survival on the Earth will call for much more complex thinking and actions. In this work, I reach back into my visual archives, I try and listen to the present and envision the possibilities in the future. Notes: (i.) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). (ii.) Ibid., 282. (iii.) Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture, trans. A. Wagner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 1. Tanja Softic´ works in the media of print, drawing, photography and poetic text. A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant, Soros Foundation Grant and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is currently working on a series of works of paper that examine migration and entropy, both in nature and in the human society.
Her work has been exhibited and collected by museums, libraries and galleries worldwide, including the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Department of State Art in Embassies Program. She completed print projects at Flying Horse Press, Tamarind Institute and Anderson Ranch Print Studio. Her work was published in Southern Review, Hourglass Magazine and a number of academic publications. She teaches printmaking and the art of the book at University of Richmond. |
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