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That’s That

By Lisa Radon
August 10, 2011
Culture

James Yeary. w n e f e by Jackson Mac Low a Concrete poem set to Doom music. 2011. detail.

Sure, now I say that I curated the show I wanted to see, the one I wanted to write (and think) about. But it’s beginnings were something else: There simply were a couple of a works I had seen in development that I wanted to see seen. One, above, was James Yeary’s ” w n e f e by Jackson Mac Low a Concrete poem set to Doom music,” and the others were selections from Patrick Collier’s series “Gist.” I was noticing a tendency in artmaking that was on a collision course with practices in poetry and conceptual writing. And that ground zero where they meet? That’s where my own interests lie. Reading.Writing. is an exhibition at galleryHOMELAND about the intersections between the practices of reading and writing and art making. It is the möbius strip where writing is a kind of reading is a kind of writing ∞. Most of the work in the exhibition is based on a reading of and response to a text.  The extra benefit to getting this work and related work seen is that it might temporarily gather the art community’s thinking around a set of practices for a short period of time.

The artists include:

Abra Ancliffe,
Lindsay AuCoin
derek beaulieu (Calgary)
Justin Bland
Pat Boas
Sean Joseph Patrick Carney
Patrick Collier
Carmen Denison
Emily Ginsburg
Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen
Sarah Greig (Montreal)
Sydney S. Kim
Sam Korman
Katarina Petrović (Belgrade)
McIntyre Parker (San Francisco)
Lisa Radon
Helen Reed
Namita Gupta Wiggers
James Yeary

And Reading.Writing. runs through September 9 at galleryHOMELAND (2505 SE 11th) with viewing hours from 12-5 Friday through Sunday. So you could go have a look, and then we could talk about it.

I talked with Eva Lake on her weekly KBOO show Art Focus last week. And I’m going to be talking about it some more with a curator’s talk (we’ll walk through) as one part of the regular Research Club Brunch on August 28 at 12 noon and before that, this coming weekend with Patrick Collier, Pat Boas, and Abra Ancliffe at 1 PM for a panel called Reading Art, Writing Art.

It will be a great conversation with these individuals coming at the notion from different angles. But as one who spends much of her time writing about art, sitting down with a couple of others who split their time between making art and writing about it, and making art and educating, to talk about making art about writing and reading, is going to be a luxury. See you there.

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