Jessica Smith, a.rawlings, Helen White

Jessica Smith: Veil



a.rawlings: rule of three

Claire took this amazing picture of the shadows cast by angela's poems

Helen White
I like giving away my pebbles to people. Dirk Vekemans swapped me a pebble for this lovely little Buddha, who spent the rest of the exhibition as part of my piece. He lives on my bedside table now (the Buddha, not Dirk).
These last two pictures are stills from Svend Thomsen's film.
I think this last one in particular comes closer to what I was trying to do than the piece itself - thanks Svend!

angela's angles

So you can see things how someone else sees them...

(with thanks to angela for letting me plunder her facebook album)

Sharon Harris, Blues

Jessica Smith, Veil (as modelled by the lovely Xavier Roelens)

Maja Jantar

a.rawlings


Moniek Darge

Jenny Sampirisi

Helen White

Alixandra Bamford

Angela Szcepaniak and Jennifer Scappettone

Review by Moniek Darge

Moniek has written a review of infusoria for the next issue of the Logos Blad (the Logos Foundation’s monthly magazine): the text should appear there shortly in Dutch. In the meantime, here’s an English translation. (I added the links myself, for anyone who might want to know where Molenbeek is or what the Koekelberg looks like...)

Infusoria

Organiser Helen White and I are on the train to Brussels, to put the finishing touches to a small exhibition of visual poetry made by women just before it opens. Without wishing to dwell on my own expectations, I imagine mainly videos and internet pieces. As for myself, I have been invited to contribute two music boxes, which Helen has already installed for me.
The activity is part of a “Foire du Livre OFF 2009” and is being held at the Maison des Cultures in Molenbeek.

The metro takes us as far as the avenue that leads to the Koekelberg Basilica. We walk down several side streets with mainly North African residents, pass a typical grocer’s shop with vegetables displayed in front of it and end up in a building that looks like a school. The corridors are decorated with colourful silhouettes of children, drawings and photos and the place exudes a vibe of multicultural community work similar to initiatives in our part of Ghent.

The exhibition has found a home in a small room that has been given a highly original atmosphere with huge cardboard boxes placed in the middle of the room on their narrow sides like a sculpture. Some of the contributions to the exhibition are fixed to the sides of the boxes and there are plinths around the room with three-dimensional works. There is no sign of the internet or video works I had expected.

An employee of the Maison des Cultures is hard at work attaching the spotlights and bending them to the correct angle, and a second man is pacing nervously back and forth with his hands full of materials and tools. He warns us to hurry up and is clearly not convinced that we will be able to open on time, because at three o’clock he is going to open the doors, whether we are ready or not. I’m at a loss as to why he is so worried, because everything seems to be just about ready. I can’t resist having a quick look round to get an impression of the whole exhibition. A couple of striking works grab my attention right away. A group of old-fashioned teacups with teabags covered in text; underneath a bell jar, all kinds of little dolls, toys and dice with letters on them that have rolled out of a bottle lying on its side and a six-sided wooden box in which blocks with letters on them are displayed on a cheerful pink cushion. The playfulness of the exhibition is right up my street.

Helen is already busy attaching name cards and I offer to help. This is how I find out that the teacups are by the Canadian Alixandra Bamford and that the bottle under the bell jar and the box with blocks inside are by the same person, Michelle Detorie from California, who grew up in South Carolina. I’m curious about what Helen’s own contribution is, and it turns out to be little plexiglas cubes, one of which contains transparent films with text on, and another contains balls of sticky tape with letters on them. In places openings have been made to look through, bordered with a star of red or gold thread. Small pebbles are lying between the boxes with text on them. As a whole, they emanate both endless patience and great playfulness.

On one of the side walls, a door is concealed behind a translucent curtain into which messages in Morse code have been worked in stitching and beadwork. It was made by Jessica Smith from Buffalo and bears the self-evident title “Veil”. Unfortunately I can’t read the texts, but they remind me of my father who used to spend whole evenings signalling when we were small children, and often let us listen in to the mysterious Morse code messages from distant lands. Might that be where I get my wanderlust from?

My two music boxes are displayed in all their glory under their plexiglas domes. I have chosen to exhibit two particularly visual boxes with lots of different colours and quirky shapes. One of them displays curled Thai finger extensions in yellow copper, with blue glass marbles and two moving eyeballs that roll back and forth between them. The other box contains brightly coloured fishing floats and two blue tropical fish.

It is almost three o’clock, and I make eager use of the last few minutes to take a quick look round at the other activities. Besides the alternative French-language book fair, there is another photo exhibition by local residents that gives us a view of colourful festivals and overflowing living rooms. An African man stops me with a steely glance and a brochure in his hand: he turns out to be from some christian sect or other which wants me to listen to the voice of jesus calling my name and warmly invites me to come and sing his praises.

I beat a hasty retreat back to our room and at three o’clock the doors swing wide open and our first visitor come in. When he stops at the music boxes, I lift off the dome and start the first story. When I hold the fish to his ears so he can hear the ultra-quiet sound they make, he protests, telling me he used to be a long-haul sailor and that the sea is not silent at all, but that constant pandemonium rages over the waves.

The time flies by and as I make my way back to the metro, the lively images of this small exhibition full of good things are dancing in front of my eyes. I am genuinely delighted that there are people like Helen White who put their heart and soul into promoting visual poetry, which would otherwise remain unknown.

Moniek Darge

Thanks Moniek! *blushing pink*

You can find more of Moniek’s strange and wonderful music boxes here.

Jessica Smith

Veil







“Beauty is neither the veil nor the veiled object but the object in its veil” – Walter Benjamin

The beading on these translucent veils forms writing in Morse code. It is a kind of homage to that quality of language that we hardly ever experience once you know a language well, but that is common when learning a language: when you look at a sign system and you know it has meaning and that you should be able to understand it but you can't. The “aha moment” of recognizing meaning in a series of signs is magical for me, but that moment, as the language passes from opacity to translucence, fades as quickly as it arrives.

Veil texts:
1
abandon the real in favour of strata folds of fake above the Real a masterpiece of cloaked desire not only minds not only behaviours have strata sense has layers and their random tectonic intersections may mean or not

2
surface is sceptical; beware the clear surface the one without history rejoice in the palimpsest, however cloudy or alien when what comes through is horrible monstrous the result is at least in the palimpsest traceable

3
check the history of your expression how many things fall under a smile that turns into pursed lips at the end sometimes smiles lie or one has to cut them off before they reveal a real happiness stop smiling before someone recognizes

4
A linguistic substratum consists in the survival of features typical of a language
formerly spoken in an area in the language which has replaced it talking about the morphology of language is not accidental language is both topographical and animalistic

5
we can use language to veil our thoughts language more often veils and reveals and indeed it benefits power structures by veiling I am with language and I am with silence I have language and I have silence I have power and I have power

6
language is what consistently bubbles to the surface language fossils can be unearthed from sedimentary languages thus while the limits of my language are the limits of my world the implicit history of my knowledge is a history of coverings-over erasure shift veiling palimpsest

~~~~~~~

Jessica Smith studied at SUNY Buffalo, where she founded the poetry magazine name and won the Academy of American Poets Prize twice. She has written one full-length poetry book, Organic Furniture Cellar (2006) and several chapbooks: bird-book (Detumescence), Telling Time (No Press), Shifting Landscapes (above/ground press) and butterflies (Big Game Books). She is the editor of the magazine Foursquare.

~~~~~~~

As with several people's work, my photos don't do the veils justice. The beaded veils are lilac and the ones without beads opalescent white, which doesn't really come across with the back-lighting. Who am I trying to fob off with photos anyway? Come and see the exhibition live, this Sunday at four! I'm still working on the big red hot-air balloon that will be stopping by in New York, Toronto, Istanbul etc. to bring you all here. Clap your hands if you believe in subsidies....

Thursday evening performances

The poets included Ricardo Domeneck, an originally Brazilian poet who lives in Berlin and edits Hilda magazine, and Eduard Escoffet, a Catalan poet who performed the Krikri festivals in 2003 and 2008.

I’ve been unlucky with Ricardo’s readings: his outdoor performance at the Poesiefestival Berlin was cancelled due to torrential rain, and last night the projector wasn’t working, which is tough on a poet who uses a lot of video art in his performances. The pleasure of a straightforward reading, though, was that it brought out the quality of the texts. My favourites were a piece in English based on various dictionary definitions of ‘body’ – I’m making it sound boring, but he did original and surprising things with an old idea – and a multilingual piece that danced from Portuguese to German to English to Spanish to Italian without tripping over its toes. It reminded me a little of something Jessica said about her ‘Veils’ (in the exhibition – I’ll blog about them soon): the experience of language learning “when you look at a sign system and you know it has meaning and that you should be able to understand it but you can’t … that moment, as the language passes from opacity to translucence, fades as quickly as it arrives.” For me Ricardo’s poem was constantly slipping between the veils, girasoles and Schmetterlingen.

This is the fourth time I’ve heard Eduard perform, I think. I don’t know whether he has ever performed in North America (hint hint Jenny, angela…) but if you get the chance to see him you will come out of the auditorium floating several inches off the ground. His Catalan translation of Paul Celan’s ‘Sprich auch du’ (parla tu tambe sprich auch du, on his myspace page) is the only poem that has ever had me dancing round the living room… I’m not sure how Celan would feel about that, but then he never heard his poem in Catalan. Eduard uses a mixture of languages, and often works with translations projected onto a screen behind him, but as I said the projector wasn’t working last night. The performance and musical aspects of his work are easily strong enough for it not to matter that the audience don’t always understand the words, but this is the first time I’ve been struck by the oddness of regularly performing for a roomful of people who don’t speak your language at all. And by the beauty of Eduard’s hand gestures: he dances his work, much in the way that an Indian dancer mimes a song text.

First pictures

I know you all need to see what we’ve done with your work but I’m going to post the photos gradually, taking my time to get a good photo of each piece. In the meantime a couple of general pics…



I went to Brussels with my Krikri colleague Maja Jantar on Monday to set everything up. Maja is an absolute genius when it comes to adapting a space, and I am so grateful to her for the hard work and huge quantities of inspiration she has put in this week. I’m not sure if the photos entirely reflect the way the two huge cardboard boxes open up the space and change it from a cramped rectangle into a garden of echoing lines. They also provide extra surfaces for exhibiting work, and something eye-catching to entice people into the room. The boxes are courtesy of Thomas, who scoured Antwerp’s music shops for big instrument boxes and went to unbelievable lengths to get them to us in time, and also gave us the idea of using them this way (he did something similar at the Krikri 2006 festival).

The positioning of Derya’s series make the height of the room more manageable and echo angela rawlings’ work across the room, as well as Suzan’s series down the side of the larger box; Angela Szczeapaniak’s red mounting boards resonate with the red floor tiles and the red background to angela’s series; the shape of the boxes work with the covered blackboard, which we couldn’t take down from the wall. Moniek’s big plastic domes covering her work, and the glass dome we used to keep Michelle’s tiny objects safe, take some of the solidity and squareness out of the surroundings, as do Jessica’s veils with the lamp behind them. One visitor described the space as ‘Zen,’ which it certainly wasn’t when we arrived there on Monday morning.