Work included
The 2019 series includes work from five artists or pairs of collaborators.
Causes of Death
Kristen Miller
Seven curious and fantastical causes of death surface in a field of bright shards—like peering through a kaleidoscope into a world where, at any moment, one might die of wonder. Causes of Death is an erasure of Guy Trebay’s “Dreaming of Bill Cunningham at the Men’s Wear Shows in Paris,” which appeared in the New York Times on June 28, 2016.
I've Been Thinking About Survival
C. Kubasta and Mollie Oblinger
I’ve Been Thinking About Survival layers Mollie Oblinger’s renderings of the Great Lakes watershed & her drawings of creatures, with C. Kubasta’s words. Both artist & poet were inspired by the doings of their science colleagues & students, when they found themselves inhabiting the space of another discipline – watching others peer into microscopes, graph daphnia responses to environment, differentiate behaviors & bodies in experimental conditions.
You are Now Carrying Contraband
Chaun Webster
Using several source texts you are now carrying contraband is a sonic and visual exploration which places David Walker’s Appeal alongside Amiri Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America. Walker would be murdered soon after the release of his Appeal. Baraka, who served as the New Jersey Poet Laureate, would be asked to resign from his post after writing Somebody Blew Up America following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. After refusing to do so the governor took the case to the United States Supreme Court, removing the position from the state. In situating these two texts and responses to them you are now carrying contraband examines censorship, surveillance, state sanctioned violence, and the appropriations and subversive uses black subjects have had of language—a technology often deployed against them.
Lineage
Bryan Borland and Seth Pennington
LINEAGE is comprised of a poem written by Bryan Borland and a found image, a collage, and a series of self-portraits by Seth Pennington, some of which are digitally double-exposed over daguerreotypes housed in the Library of Congress’ collection. This project explores the connective tissue of our very being, how every act continues in its momentum in present day.
The Road Not Taken
Christian Bök
The Road Not Taken refers, of course, to the poem by Robert Frost, and my submission responds to the path of the poet — “the one less travelled.” Poetry is, in fact, the name of a town in Texas (and no other community in the world bears such a moniker). Maston Ussery, a merchant from 1865, has bestowed this name upon the town, because, for him, the region in springtime calls to mind a poem. I have marked this locale on Google Maps, capturing this site for a slide that precedes six other images, each of which represents a section from Poetry Rd. — a causeway, situated near Poetry, Texas. I have divided up the road into six equidistant coordinates, framing six straight, unmarked sections of the road on Google Maps, after which I erase any text, so as to produce an abstract painting — a kind of visual poetry that documents a path along which a poet might make a figural journey. I have included coordinates so that, after viewing the painting in the viewfinder, a reader might consult Google Maps in order to see this “road” of poetry in real life.