Isolated Fictions at Philadelphia’s FLUXspace
January 31, 2010
polarsketch by rebecca grady
posted by caroline picard
Remember how we went to AS220 with “Isolated Fictions?” Now we’re taking the North Georgia Gazette to Philadelphia! The following artists are going to be in a group show based on the book. You can go here to get a copy!
Isolated Fictions FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
featuring the work of Amanda Browder, Nick Butcher, Jason Dunda,
Rebecca Grady, Devin King, Carmen Price & Deb Sokolow
Exhibition Dates: February 6 – March 6, 2010
Opening Reception: February 6, 2010, 7 – 10 pm
Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12 – 4 pm or by appointment
FLUXspace is pleased to present Isolated Fictions, a group exhibition featuring work by Amanda Browder, Nick Butcher, Jason Dunda, Rebecca Grady, and Deb Sokolow, and curated by Caroline Picard, Founding Director of Green Lantern Gallery & Press (Chicago, IL). Isolated Fictions is an Independent Project of Philagrafika 2010, Philadelphia’s international festival celebrating print in contemporary art. There will be an opening reception for the exhibition on February 6, 2010 from 7 – 10 pm. In conjunction with the exhibition, FLUXspace will also host a temporary reading room in the gallery and launch a new project, the yet-to-be-named archive.
About 200 years ago, a fleet of English ships got stuck in the Arctic ice for a year. Their Captain had them run up canvas, covering the ships’ masts. They battened the hatches, so to speak, and watched as the sun set for winter’s entirety, waiting with unimaginable patience for spring. They waited for their passage home to melt. Under Captain Parry’s orders, the fleet printed a newspaper: the entries of which were solicited from the men on deck, under the condition that nothing depressing be published. These men also put on plays.
Chicago’s Green Lantern Press is proud to announce the re-release of this manuscript, The North Georgia Gazette. Touring the country along with this book is a group exhibition, Isolated Fictions, featuring contemporary artists from the publication. The book has been published in an edition of 250 with original silk-screen covers and features excerpts from the Captain’s Journal, the newspaper in its entirety, an essay by contemporary Arctic explorer John Huston, end notes by transcriber/poet Lily Robert-Foley, original artwork by Daniel Anhorn, Jason Dunda, Rebecca Grady, and Deb Sokolow, and a limited edition 7″ record by Nick Butcher. The North Georgia Gazette will be available at FLUXspace for $30.
Isolated Fictions features works on paper by Deb Sokolow that address the second person, incorporating that viewer into the Arctic landscape; large gouache paintings of impossible wood towers by Jason Dunda that parallel the newspaper’s impossible success; maps of the Arctic, as well as a sculpture of an ice floe by Rebecca Grady; and a 7” record made of wood glue by Nick Butcher that plays on repeat.
The Newspaper itself functions as a metaphor for an inherent aspect of humanity: whether the Arctic is a devastating place, or a place wild with imagination and longing, it represents the unknown. That unknown can exist in the world, between neighboring communities. But often that unknown space is within oneself, and though it is essential to try and communicate those territories—to study them and map them out, they maintain a mysterious ground. And it is in the failure of exposing everything, or knowing everything, that we accomplish great heights of beauty.
In conjunction with Isolated Fictions, there will also be a reading room in the gallery space; books, magazines, newspapers, and a variety of printed ephemera will be on display and available for perusal. The reading room will be part of a new project at FLUXspace, the yet-to-be-named archive, which aims to collect printed documents from Philadelphia’s visual art scene, and also books and magazines of general interest. We hope to build this archive over time and would welcome submissions from other art spaces. Materials included in the archive thus far: Arts Exchange, Green Lantern Press, machete, Megawords, New Art Examiner, and various Philadelphia exhibition postcards and printed materials.
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Caroline Picard is the Founding Director of The Green Lantern Gallery & Press, and a Co-Editor for the literary podcast The Parlor (www.theparlorreads.com). Her writing has been published in a handful of publications including the Philadelphia Independent, NewCity, Ampersand Review, MAKE Magazine, the Chicago Art Journal Review, and Proximity Magazine. Twice a year she meets with a performance group and records improvised music under the collective alias Thee Iran Contras. She continues to paint and exhibit her visual work.
Born in Missoula, MT in 1976, Amanda Browder currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Amanda received her MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2001, and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2001-07. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Lothringer 14, Munich, Germany; White Columns, New York; Mixture Contemporary Gallery, Houston, TX; The Missoula Museum of the Arts, Missoula, MT; Gallery 400-UIC, and The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. She is also a founding member of the art-podcast: www.badatsports.com.
Nick Butcher is an artist and musician living in Chicago, IL. Since the summer of 2006, Butcher has run a studio space/printshop with Nadine Nakanishi called Sonnenzimmer. While the focus is poster design and printing, they also host exhibitions and art events. Recently, Butcher completed a solo-album called “Bee Removal.”
Jason Dunda received his BA in Fine Arts from York University, Toronto and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives and works in Chicago. Jason has previously exhibited in Toronto and Chicago.
Rebecca Grady is a Chicagoan by way of Alaska and Maine. When she was too little to walk, she was pulled around on a sled by a German Shepherd called Namer. When she grows up she wants to be a sailor. Meanwhile, she is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also teaches drawing. Mini comics, mix tapes, tropical storms and more can be found on her website: www.rubaccaquon.com.
Devin King is an artist who lives and works in Chicago, IL. Using text, music and performance as a coalescent medium, King has performed a variety of one-man operas, including most recently “Hadyn’s Head and Madame X,” as part of The 2010 Rhinoceros Festival. His long poem, CLOPS. is due out spring of 2010 with the Green Lantern Press.
Carmen Price’s work creates new relationships between familiar visual elements to express joy in contemporary culture. His celebratory drawings use personal symbolism and a strong faith in the accidental to form occasionally narrative and often confusing scenes. Originally from Kansas City, MO, Carmen Price currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Deb Sokolow’s recent projects include site-specific installations at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO and at Inova [Institute of Visual Arts] in Milwaukee, WI. She is an Illinois Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship recipient, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL. Sokolow received her MFA in 2004 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
The Green Lantern Gallery & Press is a 501(c)3 non-profit gallery and paperback press dedicated to the study, presentation, and archive of contemporary art practice. Because we believe that independent cultural production and idiosyncratic effort is the fount for meaning and friendship, The Green Lantern also hosts monthly art exhibitions for emerging artists and publishes limited-edition books by new or forgotten writers who are making significant contributions to today’s cultural landscape. With a focus on the visual arts, The Green Lantern establishes paths of accessibility between the work and its audience by contextualizing its events through writing, a literary reading series – The Parlor, video, performance and music. For more information please visit www.thegreenlantern.org.
FLUXspace is a Philadelphia based 501(c)3 contemporary arts space which provides artists, curators, and instigators the opportunity for unrestricted and uncensored experimentation, professional presentation, and critical dialogue for the purpose of exploring and creating new art practices and media. FLUX consists of an exhibition space, an artist residency program, as well as public programming including artist lectures, panel discussions, workshops, movie nights and performances.
Framework
January 30, 2010
posted by caroline picard
Amanda Browder’s “Cyclone” meets Green Lantern cat
January 29, 2010
posted by caroline picard
Pierre Joris reads tonight at SAIC
January 29, 2010
posted by caroline picard
The Chicago Poetry Project, the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago Writing Program, and the University of
Chicago Committee on Creative Writing present
an evening with poet/translator/scholar
PIERRE JORIS
Friday, January 29
5:30 pm sharp
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection
5th floor of the Sharpe Building, 37. S. Wabash
Chicago, IL
PIERRE JORIS has moved between the US, Great Britain, North
Africa, France & Luxembourg for some forty years now. He has
published over 40 books of poetry, essays and translations. In
2007 & 2008 he published Aljibar and Aljibar II (poems, a
bilingual edition with French translation by Eric Sarner,
Editions PHI, Luxembourg). Justifying the Margins: Essays
1990-2006 came out in 2009 from SALT in the UK. His 2007
publications are the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken,
oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; & Mitch Elrod,
guitar) issued by Ta¹wil Productions and Meditations on the
Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj 1-21 (Anchorite Press, Albany).
Other translations include Paul Celan: Selections (University
of California Press) and 4×1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour translated by
Pierre Joris from Inconundrum Press. With Jerome Rothenberg he
edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of
California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Green Integer
published 3 volumes of his Paul Celan translations:
Breathturn, Threadsuns and Light-duress (which received the
2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award). He lives in Bay Ridge,
Brooklyn with his wife, the performance artist Nicole
Peyrafitte & teaches poetry & poetics at the State University
of New York, Albany. You can find more information and
writings at his website, http://pierrejoris.com/ .
J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91
January 28, 2010
posted by caroline picard
This article was published in the NY Times. You can read it in its entirety by going here.
J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91
J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”
Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Minced English
January 28, 2010
posted by Caroline Picard
I started reading this book by Amira Hanafi; it’s kind of an interesting story in the way of independent/alternative publishing. It’s available through LULU–what makes me pretty excited already, because using Lulu provides yet another means of distributing work. Something once again counter to the traditional agent/publishing house model. From what I can tell, Minced English is an interesting list (provided in paragraph/sentence form) of examples used in the OED when describing the mixture of races. Words like amerasian, biracial, chee-chee, half-blood, metif, metis, miscegenation, mixed breed, mongrel, half-caste, mutt, paulista, sambo, tereceroon, possess their own respective categories with sentences that implement the word to demonstrate, presumably, their usage and meaning. While Hanafi’s presentation of these words is cold and detached (she is after all nothing more than a list maker, a collage artist, an organizer), the momentum of each page speaks for itself, depicting both the color, imagination and violence that categorical words are capable of. The sentences speaks from a variety of different time periods; some of them are old-timey, sounding like they come from newspapers of old America, or the notes of conquistadors, still others seem lifted from rap videos or contemporary speech. Hanafi’s detachment presents all of these with seeming remote aestheticism, as to create an arc of political realization: that a dominant culture created these categories and that the application of those categories is its own subjugation.
An Excerpt from
Minced English
by Amira Hanafi
mutt
I was going to bet $100 on Long Bridget at 20 to 1 and take a chance on being crunched to a pulp if the mutt lost the race. He’s not trick mutt, anyhow. Naturally, d’mutt who owns d’store is out an ‘eager to do business. Watch that mut curl up out there. A fellow can’t leave nothin’ on his bed without that mutt chawin’ it up! The mutt ran along the inside of the fence and handed me a bunch of barks that joggled my spine. They commenced picking out the worst mutts they could. Engaged to that Ver Plank fellow that hanging around. I think he’s a mutt. Dougal, the elder brother, was a quiet, inoffensive kind of mutt. Be careful the mutt doesn’t get into a race with a caterpillar some day, and die of heart collapse. There are people who especially desire mutt dog. Got to look up a mutt named Chavenay. We’ll run that jug-headed utt of yours off its legs tomorrow. Two barefooted hippies were sharing a bag of potato chips with a happy-looking mutt. Examples of Rhyming Slang usually used in abbreviation form: Deaf. Mutt. You gone mutt ‘ave you Stobey/ The consultant made such comments as ‘Is she a mutt?’ The laguhter in this case coming because some other poor mutt has been conned and victimised. Mutt, disliked or ugly girl. The leg might have been a tossed bone that any flop-eared mutt could gnaw on. Mutt, slang for a sorry horse. If this Suvorov mutt really was a former KGB officer, then he’d been expertly trained to disappear.
Coming this Thursday: Night at the Opera
January 26, 2010
posted by Caroline Picard
The Rhino Festival showcases a host of talent during its annual enterprise. You can find out about all of the various things going on by going here.
That said, The Green Lantern Press is about to release a long poem (‘CLOPS.’) by this gentleman, one Devin King, who performed a “b-side” of his opera project at Elastic last year.
Prior to Elastic, Devin performed a one-man opera with Sean O’Connell in its entirety at a church on North Avenue. Last year, the opera was about Don Quixote, Phil Spectre’s head, Elvis and a Betty.
This year it’s about Haydn’s head and Madame X. This is the blurb, but you should come!
Madame X Paints Haydn Red
by Devin King
Three people trapped in a recording studio arguing about their debut: “I thought I turned you off…such a historicizing of the echo.” Madame X Paints Haydn Red is an operetta that deals with youth culture stuck in a soundproof room moving between centuries of recording technology: Joseph Haydn’s head stolen by phrenologists; the Jam re-recording the Kinks’ David Watts; RCA color-coding their new 45 rpm records; “Opera is a shoddy refuge for emotional dishonesty.” The musicians evolve with their recording techniques and all the while Madame X paints Haydn red.
February 2nd : Sara Levine at The Parlor
January 25, 2010
Sara Levine will be at The Parlor Tuesday February 2 at 7pm!
Sara Levine’s writing has appeared in Nerve, The Iowa Review, Puerto del Sol, Caketrain, Necessary Fiction, Brain, Child, The Fairy Tale Review, and other magazines. Her essays can be found in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present and A Best of Fence. Once upon a time she wrested a PhD in literature from Brown University and received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies. She chairs the Writing program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Following her 30 minute reading, Sara will take questions from the audience.
As always, the event will be recorded and published on-line for your repeated listening pleasure on iTunes and at www.theparlorreads.com
All readings take place at 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave, 2nd Floor.
For more information, please visit www.theparlorreads.com or contact theparlorreads@gmail.com
The Parlor is a monthly reading series sponsored by Bad At Sports Podcast (www.badatsports.com).
A stranger in London
January 25, 2010
I was asked to enter the home of a stranger.
I had crossed Kensington Gardens with the intention of wandering around south of there in search of English Heritage blue plaques, specifically those that designated the former residences of literary figures. I was beginning to become frustrated after an hour of looking to no avail. At one point, a Royal Service postman was paces ahead of me so I considered enlisting his help, but before I could pull out the London A to Z (pronounced Zed), the postman had zoomed too far ahead of me so that I reconsidered disrupting him while he busily worked. I then decided to wander the streets within the confines of 3D on the map, hoping to happen upon one of the literary plaques in the area.
Passing the church for the umpteenth time, it occurred to me that Kensington Church Walk might be inside the church’s property. I ducked down a path next to the church that led to another path, and finally I spotted a blue plaque: Ezra Pound’s. I shot a few photographs of the plaque. As I walked around the corner of the building, I saw a woman poke her head up from inside the building, and the next thing I knew, she was inviting me in to her home and I was accepting the invitation without hesitation.
I was in her dining room, and she asked, “Do you want any tea or coffee?” immediately followed by “But who are you exactly?” After brief introductions, Christine walked into the adjoining kitchen as I rifled through my bag’s contents in her dining room.
As she heated the water for tea, she asked me to guess her age, which I realized that she realized was difficult, given her liveliness. No, not 72, which, in all honesty, was a little younger than I thought she was, but I try to be polite. She is 87 years old, which she told me before showing me the coffee mugs to choose and revealing her own mug’s significance (the bird on its external surround reminded her of a friendly-enough-to-eat-out-of-a-hand bird that her daughter who lived in Australia had nicknamed Eric).
After telling me that she had lived there since 1986, she told me that I could sit anywhere in the living room—except the green chair. As I walked ahead, leaving her in the kitchen, I passed through the dining room, which was connected to a room of plants (a person looking through one of the kitchen’s window could see the plants there). The dining room and the living room walls were covered with African masks and oil-painted portraits in front of William Morris wallpaper (the mug I chose matched the wallpaper). Christine’s collections sitting in windowsills, shelves, and the piano included more plants and numerous feathers. I snapped a few photos before she joined me in the living room.
She showed me a picture of Ezra Pound (a view from the side; his hair looked thick and full). She began telling me the story of the day the home was designated an English Heritage site. She allowed me to capture it on video, though I had my digital camera initially turned sideways and a few seconds into it I turned it rightways, but it was a strange result. Regardless, she said:
“When the plaque was attached to the house for the first time, there was almost an opening ceremony. Quite a crowd of people. It was English Heritage that organized it, and they invited, you know, a lot of people who all came around to look at it and see it being unveiled. There was a red velvet curtain over it. The lady who pulled the string was his daughter. Now that is the one who gave me that picture because that was given to her on this occasion. We were all invited to go around to the town hall, which is a long that way, and there, we were given a reception. We were each given a glass of wine to begin with, and then she and I were both given enormous bunches of flowers. And, after that, they gave her that portrait, which has vanished—oh, it’s right there. And after it was over, and we were coming home, she to her place and I to mine, you know, she handed that to me, and she said she thought that it would be good and he would approve of him being kept permanently in the house where he lived. He lived on the floor above. That was his room.”
Then she handed me a scrapbook with its first pages devoted to Ezra Pound and the plaque ceremony. Ezra Pound’s daughter looked to be around the same age as Christine, and there were, in fact, red velvet curtains, though they were smaller than I expected; they weren’t much taller than the plaque.
After perusing the scrapbook, she pulled another book out. I began taping.
She said, “Ancient Music. Now I don’t know if you learned when you were young a song called . . .” and then she proceeded to sing:
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu. . . .
Christine said, “And so it goes on, you see, and this is his version of that poem, and it’s called ‘Ancient Music,’ and it says:
Winter is icumin in,
Lhude sing goddamn!
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ram
Sing goddamn!
Skiddth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing goddamn.
Goddamn, goddamn, tis why I am goddamn,
So gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamn, sing goddamn, DAMN!
Christine emphatically said the last “DAMN,” which caused us both to laugh.
I asked about her interest in music because she seemed to enjoy music and, in fact, broke out in song occasionally (earlier in the kitchen she had sung). She admitted that her short-term memory wasn’t as good as it once was, and sometimes pieces of conversation sparked her memory of a tune.
I also asked about the feathers in her home, and she said that peacocks once roamed Holland Street nearby but now lived behind the walls of a private residence.
On my way out, Christine relayed a tale about a time when she traveled all the way down to the bottom of a mine in Australia—her husband had been a civil service worker—and at the bottom, it was so humid and heavy that they all hovered around a fan. She told me that she had traveled much in her lifetime and had had a good, full life so now she didn’t mind sitting back and reminiscing.
Also, she explained that she had altered the interior of the building. She had worked at home as a psychotherapist (she briefly mentioned the silver method of mind control). She had separated her living space from her working space by constructing an interior wall past the stairs so patients could go directly upstairs to her. My eyes traveled up the stairs as she said that it was there, on the second floor, that Pound had lived.
She invited me to visit her again sometime.
One Dimensional Women: Nina Power and Zero Books
January 24, 2010
posted by caroline picard
I recently finished One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power. It’s one of the Zero Books, a great project that states in its mission: “Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces – both physical and cultural – are now either derelict or colonized by advertising…Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist – is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual.”
Power’s work lives up to all those expectations. Providing clear and reasoned insight into the pitfalls of feminism–a title that, according to Power, further commodifies the woman, making her values complicit with consumerism such that the contemporary woman celebrates her independence via purchasing power and decadent selfishness. “I think there’s a very real sense in which women are supposed to say ‘chocolate’ whenever someone asks them what they want,” (Power, p. 37). Rather than fulfill herself, however, the contemporary feminist further distances herself from herself, her body, her peers. “They, the breasts, and not their ‘owner,’ are the center of attention, and are referred to with alarming regularity, as completely autonomous objects, mush as one would refer to suitcases or doughnuts. Constantly fiddled with, adjusted, exposed, covered-up or discussed, contemporary breasts resemble nothing so much as bourgeois pets: idiotic, toothless, yapping dogs with ribbons in their hair and personalized carrying pouches.” Concise, generously phrased and to the point, Power describes the society in which we live, one governed by a market that, through momentum and historical precedent, alienates women, alienates sexuality and, really, separates the individual from a sense of freedom. You can pick up the book by going here.
Power also describes this film, “This 1966 Czech film features two young women who dedicate their lives to spoiling everything in increasingly surreal ways, with seemingly little rhyme or reason. Who are these irresponsible young women who find it more amusing to play with each other, and occasionally with men, but only so they can return to each other and be yet more ‘spoiled’ (a in ruined rather than pampered, of course)? The formal inventiveness of the film would undermine its claims to ‘realism,’ but this is all the better. For all the male ‘coming of age’ stories in the world, it makes sense that their rare female equivalent would have to be as bizarre as possible,” (p.40).
