Jul 142013
 

DW-Ark_Codex

I’m happy to report in on a recent joyous dance of my reader-self and viewer-self as I turned the pages of ARK CODEX, a thoroughly engaging visual/verbal collage “novel.” My curiosity about this authorless book led me to question its shepherd, the one who goaded this “mutated goat” of a book into being. Says Derek White, “Each word is a collage in itself . . . .” Yes! And the correspondences between the bits of text and gorgeous etchings bring an unusual intrigue to the pages and to the journey of this odd ark/book.

Derek White lives in New York City where he publishes Calamari Books and Sleepingfish Magazine. Do explore more of his work via the web links. You won’t be sorry!

— Nance Van Winckel

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Ark Codex 0:2:43 13x19 cm, multimedia (collage/frottage) Derek White

Ark Codex 0:2:43 13×19 cm, multimedia (collage/frottage)

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Nance Van Winckel: I know you’re interested in Derrida and his ideas that words refer primarily to other words, rather than to things and ideas, and also his view of texts as residing finally beyond authors, of literary works as collective enterprises generated by a concert of forces: reader, writer, cultural echoes surrounding them, etymologies, etc. I like how Ark Codex ±0 clearly allows the whole of itself to be “created” by those forces, and I appreciate how much I have to “bring” to the book myself. My own imagination and intellect are truly involved in furthering the book’s narrative momentum and visual journey. Could you talk a little about your own sense of authorlessness and the “concert of forces” that make the Ark Codex.

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Ark Codex 0:1:1 13x19 cm, multimedia (collage/frottage) Derek White

Ark Codex 0:1:1 13×19 cm, multimedia (collage/frottage)

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Derek White: Thank you, you are reading Ark Codex as i hoped it would be read. At the end of the day Ark Codex, any book, is a bound stack of paper on a shelf . . . until a reader comes along. Readers are the true “authors”—the ones who give meaning to a book. And your reading of it is just as valid and important as any other, including mine. Sure, my role is unique in that i experienced Ark Codex as it was coming together, but i think of my role more as a shepherd. Or, okay, maybe a breeder. And i personally prefer to think of goats rather than sheep, wherein the goats are other books and ideas . . . yes Derrida’s books being some of those goats. But Derrida is not one of those goats—I’ve never met Derrida. Sadly, he is dead. But his books aren’t (and in this sense, neither is he). Ark Codex is some sort of mutated goat that came about by such selective breeding. But again, don’t let me be the one to tell you what Ark Codex is or isn’t; you might have a completely different beast in mind when your eyes scan over this particular confluence of text & images, based on your own prior collective associations with certain words, phrases, images, etc.

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ARK_CODEX_0-3-20

Ark Codex 0:3:30 13×19 cm, multimedia (collage/frottage)

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NVW: Collage seems both a method of creation AND a method of participation in this book. As a reader/viewer, I was fascinated by how my reader-self and my viewer-self danced about on the pages. I loved this back-and-forth interplay and how when I’d read the small passage of text at the bottom of a page, what I’d just visualized in the imagery and graphics hooked in, “enlarged,” or somehow “played with” the linguistic elements. I think the text and the visual elements achieve an amazing symbiosis or amalgamation here, and I wonder if you could comment on that interactivity of visual and verbal elements.

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H0MEovoID_8_private_gravesite_600

h0ME(o\v/o)ID 8: GRAVE[e|it]Y helps deSign find its private tombstone ID[enTITy]

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DW: Ark Codex actually started as a text, a somewhat linear narrative. If you look carefully in the pages you might find traces of it, but most of its original form is probably lost, embedded into the page, bleeding into the collage of image and other underlying or superimposed text. The footnoted text came as an afterthought—a sort of associative narrative that came about by re-processing the images. I think of them as abstracts, in a scientific sense. Collaging feels more like how at least my brain thinks. Language in its pure form is a beautiful thing, but it can also be debilitating in that we risk detachment, severance even. Someone like Peter Markus (a true guru of pure language) is so enamored by language that when he hears a word, like “river,” the first thing he thinks of is how the word looks on the page. While i also share this reverence of, especially written, language, in all its type-faced forms, i don’t want to lose sight of the actual river. But even staring at a river (which is what i look at when I’m not looking at my computer) we can still forget, or take for granted, what the river means, or has meant to us. I’m not so interested in photography or still lifes—capturing images, reducing them to their iconic forms. Collage allows us to breed new images, new ideas. And yes, when i say collage i don’t mean just images from magazines cut and pasted together. Even if I’m writing something purely textual, i think of it as collage—the way combinations of words interact and morph, glued together by syntax and grammar. And each word is a collage in itself, a vessel that contains an accumulative amalgamation of every instance and use before us.

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NVWimage1

Left to right: Ark Codex 0:3:8, 13×19 cm, multimedia (collage/frottage), and Ark Codex 0:3:9, 13×19 cm, multimedia (collage/frottage)

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NVW: For me, Ark Codex ±0 has many qualities of a novel. I’m thinking about the journey undertaken on this strange ark, an ongoing narrative that’s a kind of quirky Noah story set in realms that are by turns ancient or futuristic, metafictional or metaphysical, scientifically “steeped” or mythically enriched. I could go on and on with my list. But let’s look, for instance, at a couple of my favorite pages, these two from the third section where “we” seem to have made landfall (or are within our museum diorama) and encounter the figure of the “bush doctor.” Here’s the text which reads a bit like a ship’s log:

0:3:8: Under such sea-snaking circumstances, the bush doctor warns us to not splay our fingers. He is not counting on the fact that our <>are webbed. Before we snap out of it, he blindfolds us for continuity. We can see all the way to the end of our own nerves from within our cloth cul-de-sac. Clogged fibers branch back into the roots of palms. At this point a puncture is made to drain any misleading perceptions. Even judgment of unreliability is deemed unreliable, so we are back to square 1 with each articulation.

And from the facing page:

0:3:9: At his juncture, the kernel become clearer. A system is in place to separate trash from recyclables—organic & non-organic (& sub-divided even further). We are in a hangar now (or a diorama of 1, still in the natural history museum)—an ark house so large that isolated weather patterns form from within. It is still below freezing on this page, but the rate of the rate of change is what matters. To determine our current coordinates (& capacity for change) we integrate this rate of the rate of change in each cardinal direction.

Wow! The brevity of each of these snippets makes me feel I’m getting just a small part of a huge—HUGE!—story. Plus each piece of information makes the ark tremble. Unexpectedness in each new sentence. Where will the ark go next; what fauna and flora will we encounter; what will happen to our own physical selves? For me, it’s an adventure story in the widest possible sense of that word. If not as author or even as “authority,” but rather might you comment on the book’s behalf about its proclivities toward story in general or the novel in particular?

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Arc-incisione_H

Incisione H from Ark Codex (incised print)

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DW: Ha, you made landfall! That’s further than i got—in my mind, the narrator is constrained to the North Pole, waiting for the ice to melt, for the flood. So in this sense, nothing happens. But in such a landscape, cabin fever sets in, the imagination runs wild. I’m not very good at making things up. And i am far from a reliable source as to what is happening. If there is any semblance of story, it likely rose out of a dream. And dreams came from a warped union of personal experience (the hangar—Hangar One in Moffet Field, CA—i actually delivered a pizza to!) and the tapping of our collective unconscious. As Joseph Campbell and others have showed us, we are telling the same story over and over—this four-pronged cycle or journey. Noah’s story is just one variation on the theme, that particularly appeals to me because it is about more than just the human condition, but is inclusive of all animals, and the inherent drive in us to preserve and propagate our underlying code. Which is to me what writing and publishing is all about. Story to me is just a framing device, a vessel for language, a boat that gets you down (or up) the river. Ark Codex is a fleeting condensation of collective unconscious that materializes to stain the page, then dissolves when read, into liquid—rain that falls on the landscape, flows into the river, back to the sea … to do it all over again. The ‘story’ comes in the reader reading it. They become the ark, the historical act.

05-under_pressure

Under Pressure

—Derek White & Nance Van Winckel

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Derek White lives in NYC where he publishes Calamari Press & Sleepingfish magazine and blogs at 5cense.com. More about Ark Codex may viewed here: http://calamaripress.com/ark_codex.htm. Much more of his “bookish art” may be viewed here: http://www.5cense.com/art.htm.

Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckel is the author of six collections of poems, including After A Spell, winner of the 1999 Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry, and the recently released Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2013). She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Recent poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and a recent recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. Her stories have been published in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Kenyon Review. Boneland, her fourth collection of fiction, is forthcoming in October from U. of Oklahoma Press. Nance’s photo-collage work has appeared in Handsome Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Em, Dark Sky, Diode, Ilk, and Western Humanities Review. New visual work and an essay on poetry and photography are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and excerpts from a collage novel are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online. Click this link to see a collection of Nance Van Winckel’s mash-ups of poetry and photography, which she calls photoems. She is Professor Emerita in Eastern Washington University’s graduate creative writing program, as well as a faculty member of Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program. She lives near Spokane, Washington with her husband, the artist Rik Nelson. Her personal web page is here.


Apr 112013
 

History Lesson #9: The Order of Things | Artist Jane Buyers, Photo by Robert McNairJane Buyers, History Lesson #9: The Order of Things, 1996; Graphite on toned paper, 127.2 x 173.9 cm; Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery Collection. Gift of the artist, 2000. Photo: Robert McNair.

Strange to think of books as art, or the conjunction of words and letters (dry, pure signs) and paint and image, but here at NC it seems to be a running motif. Herewith a lovely essay from Contributing Editor Ann Ireland about a recent visit to the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and the home of artist Jane Buyers and her musician/playwright partner Don Druick who live in Mennonite country in nearby Elmira, Ontario, and, Lo! we find artful annotations and a porcelain book amid other gorgeous works. Also baked bread from a Virginia Woolf recipe and baroque music and, well, you know, pretty soon you want to move there because you are reminded that in this violent, frenetic world of post recession economics and grinding little wars — trouble, trouble everywhere — there are actually people who live the life of the mind and art.

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Jane Buyers on Viola di GambaJane Buyers: Photo by Ann Ireland

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I feel like the Friendly Giant leaning down to peer into the miniature studio with its pint-sized furniture and tiny tools hanging on the wall. It looks like the mini-artist just stepped out of the room, leaving the drafting table with a rough sketch laid out and papers flung beneath. The multi-paned windows give me a shake of memory – they are south facing, if I recall correctly.

This is – or was – Jane Buyers’ studio in downtown Toronto, circa 1976, replicated inside this cube about the size of a breadbox. I lived on the other side of that wall with my artist boyfriend, Tim Deverell. There was a toilet down the hall and a retired sea captain who lived upstairs in the building, along with various spectral figures that would come and go at all hours.

This piece, part of a survey of the work of artist Jane Buyers at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery this winter, features an audio component. I place headphones over my ears and listen to a recording of German artist, Joseph Beuys, intoning T. S. Eliot.

08 Che Fare-What is to be Done,  1983Jane Buyers, Che Fare -What is to be Done (detail), 1983. Wood, paper, copper, glass, audio, electric lights, text. 154.5 cm x 49 cm x 40 cm. Photo credit: Laura Arsie.

Jane Buyers works with memory, a rescue mission using discarded artifacts and tools, as well as images from places that have been deserted. In this major survey of thirty years of work called Gather…Arrange…Maintain,[1] traces of tools have been reconstituted, sometimes scrupulously drawn in graphite on paper, sometimes fashioned into porcelain– in each case, transformed from the dustbin into something unexpected. Buyers catches our eye with the old made new: in a carefully rendered drawing of a pair of pliers the object’s utilitarian past slips away; this is not your dad outlining his tools on the wall of the basement workshop. Jane literally ‘draws’ old objects to our attention.

At one end of the gallery, huge graphite drawings of a series called Book of Hours contain images of flowers and other botanicals taken from textiles and bolts of wallpaper from generations past. The pieces play off ideas of what is decorative, or used to be considered so. I think of some ancient aunt’s curtains or upholstered furniture. The drawings are painstaking in execution and Buyers admits to a kind of ‘devotion’ in the focused labour of making them.

Book of Hours lV, 2010Jane Buyers, Book of Hours lV, 2010. Graphite on paper. 183 x 137 cm. Photo credit: Robert McNair.

She’s partial to collecting old schoolbooks containing poetry and Shakespeare plays, the text underlined and annotated. Buyers tells me: ‘The student’s handwriting is so uncertain and you feel the tremendous desire to understand. I like the anxiety and striving to grasp the meaning of the printed word.’ In one of her pieces, a black rose is planted over the scrawled notes of some long ago student struggling with the text of Macbeth.

07 Notes on Macbeth- Enter Lady Macbeth 2004Jane Buyers, Notes on Macbeth: Enter Lady Macbeth, 2004.  Lithograph, etching, chine colle. 81.5 x 102 cm.  Photo credit: Laura Arsie.

Books feel like an endangered species these days. So it is startling to see Inscriptions, a series of delicate sculptures made of porcelain. They are books flung open, some embedded with porcelain leaves- the sort of leaves that fall from trees. Organic matter meets the pulped paper – except the materials have become impossibly fragile. Their vulnerability creates a hushed feeling in the viewer. I tip toe past, wary of creating a stiff breeze.

Inscriptions 19Jane Buyers, Inscriptions #19, 2005. Porcelain, 50 x 47 x 15 cm. Photo credit: Cheryl O’Brien.

Buyers’ work is painstaking in process, requiring long hours in the studio. The result causes this high degree of attentiveness in the viewer. The eye slows down, is seduced by detail.

Tim and I have come to view the show and to visit Jane and her partner – award-winning playwright/musician/composer Don Druick at their home in Elmira, Ontario – a stone’s throw from Kitchener. It’s Mennonite country. En route between gallery and their house, driving along the New Jerusalem road, we spot horse -drawn carriages clipping along the edge of the highway, chilly Mennonites crouched in the back. It’s snowing lightly. Mennonites eschew electricity and driving cars. They sew their own plain, boxy clothing. During the growing season, Don and Jane visit nearby farms to buy produce plucked an hour earlier, dirt clinging to the gnarly carrots and sturdy lettuce.

Tim and I are city mice visiting the country mice – Elmira, population 10,000, being solidly rustic to our downtown Toronto eyes. The old yellow brick house is part of a former farm, and the garage has been fitted out as Jane’s studio. Several pairs of gumboots sit on the welcome mat of the house.

Chronicles #6, 2005Jane Buyers,Chronicles #6, 2005.  Etching with graphite drawing. 67.5 x 86.5 cm. Photo credit: Laura Arsie.

Don used to perform and compose avant garde music. I remember his visits to the Western Front, an artists’ exhibition/event space in Vancouver, back when I was a student in the 1970‘s. I thought he looked like a faun, stepping lightly across the stage, hair dyed platinum blonde, silver flute held to his lips.

We’re all a bit less faun-like these days but Don, a Latvian – Jewish native Montrealer, is still writing plays and making music. This past year, he’s been drafting a play about Lord Byron visiting the eastern townships of Quebec just after the war of 1812. A little known corner of Canadian history…

We are sitting in their country kitchen, Don crouched sideways on the chair so that he can jump up from time to time to stir the sauce that will soon be poured over manicotti. The smell of simmering garlic and onion and tomato is just about doing me in. My fingers steal across the table to grab another slice of bread, straight from the oven: ‘Virginia Woolf’s recipe for cottage loaf, ’ Don claims. I think of Virginia pounding dough with her fists. She needed to release some of that tension.

BreadVirginia Woolf’s bread

After lingering over dinner, we visit the music room. A Japanese samisen sits on a desk, relic from one of Don’s visits to that country. Music books and scores are stacked wherever there is space. Don performed ‘hundreds of times’ in public on his silver flute – but sold the instrument years ago and took up the wooden Baroque flute. He specializes in the French baroque repertoire. Quite a jump from avante garde improvisation and mixed media theatrical events.

‘I find much of the music that moved me forty years ago repugnant now,’ he says. ‘I pull out records that interested me when I was in my twenties, and find the music tedious and ugly.’ His last concert was over twenty years ago. ‘The mind and ears change,’ he says. ‘I’m no longer attracted to loud sounds. What stands the test of time? Nothing. Nothing survives; every idea modifies, even Christianity. Same as no individual survives.’

The baroque flute offers a soft, subtle sound. There is is only one key– the rest are open holes. ‘Very simple, he says. ‘Like a recorder.’

Fifteen years ago he picked up one of the subtlest instruments known to man – the Parisian baroque lute. This one was made for him by a luthier, modeled after a portrait of a seventeenth century lutenist that Don spotted in the Louvre. Lifting the instrument with its bulbous back, he cranks the tuning pegs and plays a few bars on the gut strings. It is an exceedingly delicate music, a sort of whisper into alert ears. I think of Jane’s finely crafted drawings and miniature rooms.

Donald Druick and luteDon Druick

Unexpectedly, Jane reaches for another instrument stashed in a case against the wall. It’s a viola de gamba, precursor to the cello. She’s been taking lessons; it seems there is a viola de gamba teacher right here in Elmira. Jane sets up, bow in hand, ready for a quick demo.

I shut my eyes: I’m hearing evenings of Early Music taking place on winter evenings after hearty pasta meals and mulled wine. She draws the bow across the strings and the instrument rumbles.

City Mouse is feeling pretty envious.

Later in the evening, Jane ushers us up the narrow staircase, past walls crammed with art, to where we will sleep. The second floor features sloped walls and a low ceiling and I think of my grandparents’ cottage in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Crouching to peer out the window, I press eyes to the glass and see snow blanketing the hydro wires outside and a tiny snow tent clinging to the top of a bird feeder. It’s so quiet. Then we hear the clop-clop of horses’ hooves as a buggy carries the Mennonites home.

06 Pratica #1, 1993. detailJane Buyers, Pratica #1 (detail), 1993.  Ceramic on steel table.  84 x 71 x 34 cm.  Photo credit: Laura Arsie.   Collection of Art Gallery of Woodstock.

—Ann Ireland & Jane Buyers

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Jane Buyers is an artist originally from Toronto who lives in Elmira, Ontario with her partner, the playwright Don Druick. She is Professor Emerita in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Waterloo.  Her work includes sculpture, drawing printmaking and commissioned public works.  Jane has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada as well as in the United States and Europe and her work is in many private and public collections. Jane was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2002. A survey exhibition of her work from the past 30 years was held at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery January 18 through March 10, 2013 and will be touring to other venues.  She is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Don Druick is an award winning playwright, translator & librettist, a baroque musician and a gardener and chef.  In a career spanning more than 40 years, Druick’s plays have been produced on stage, radio and television in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the USA.  His publications include play texts, translations and critical writings.  His plays, WHERE IS KABUKI? and THROUGH THE EYES, have both been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Awards.  His current plays include GEORGEVILLE, WILDEST DREAMS, and a translation of Emmanuelle Roy’s play, LAZETTE.  He lives in Elmira, a small Mennonite farming town near Waterloo, Ontario, with artist Jane Buyers.

Ann IrelandAnn Ireland is a Contributing Editor at Numéro Cinq. Hermost recent novel, The Blue Guitar, was published by Dundurn Press in early 2013. Her first novel, A Certain Mr. Takahashi, won the $50,000 Seal-Bantam First Novel Award and was made into a feature motion picture  called The Pianist in 1991. Her second novel, The Instructor, was nominated for the Trillium Award and the Barnes and Noble’s Discover These New Writers Award, and Exile was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award and the Rogers/Writers Trust Award. She is a past president of PEN Canada and coordinates Ryerson University’s Chang School of Continuing Education, Writing Workshops department. She lives most of the time in Toronto and part of the time in Mexico.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. See video of the exhibition with commentary by Jane Buyers at the bottom of the essay.
Mar 312013
 

Download1Marilyn R. Rosenberg & Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckel, poet, fiction writer, and collagist extraordinaire, inventor of the pho-toem, has gone undercover for Numéro Cinq, searching out and interviewing a series of hybrid or conceptual artists (cross-genre art — ah, but is there any other kind?). Her first subject/artist was collagist Todd Bartel, and now she introduces us to the amazing book art of Marilyn R. Rosenberg of Peekskill, NY, who, yes, explodes the concept of book into a phantasmagoria of cutting, folding, sculpting, drawing, image layering, colorizing, painting — books become sculptures, words become objects, objects become poems, poems become objects AGAIN. We all love books, adore books, but mostly for their efficacy as carriers of words, which, if you follow the logic, leads us all to owning tablet readers; what Marilyn R. Rosenberg creates is the anti-Kindle; you can’t read these on a device; she creates unique books, not for dissemination but for themselves for the beauty of the thing.

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READ, 2004, MRR, 200 dpiREAD, closed 5 1/8”h x 4 1/8”w, color photo copy edition of 15 with collage, visual poetry artists book with hand made pop up.

VERBIAGE, MRR, 2007, 200VERBIAGE, 22 1/2 h x 16 1/2” w, visual poetry/drawing.

NVW: Spending some time with the inside pages of these amazing books of yours, I’m interested in how you think about finding the right “balance” for a page—the page as drawing and the page as poem. I so admire the convergence of those two.

MRR: Both a work’s theme as well as its obvious or hidden contents decide everything about a particular page or bookwork. But how do all components, word meld into image, image size happen next to word size? How do I select hue, value and blank and filled areas?  How does relationship and interaction and placement of each component happen?  Balance is based on many things: sometimes the influence of the ground, i.e. the page, size, paper, book, either found or ready to be created with my own binding; each choice, alone or in combination with mark-making materials, adds and alters compositions, in variations, within a singular statement. Or sometimes, a word or sentence, in juxtaposition with a complex concept, causes all elements, individual ingredients, to evolve, to merge or disperse into something other than what was there before. Sometimes this happens with a noted life situation’s influence.  A record of something quickly seen, or a theme challenge either starts or enhances the new or long evolving ideas. Then the entire content shifts and what was added alters that balance, again.

Each piece starts differently and has different measures of balance and discord.  I start with combinations of words from notes I almost always make, and place them on a page, moving back and forth as image grows and turns into color. I hear words when I read them. While I work, the words turn into the image, and the image is the word heard.  Each theme develops at its own required speed: pensive, or chaotic, or restful or at a fast pace.  Almost always I build pages and bookworks from the ground up. Working back and forth, page here and then there again, word and image as one grow. All this goes on all the pages of one bookwork in the same back and forth rhythm. I must create rhythm and pace, cause loudness or quiet, allow rest or activity, as I remember agitation or pleasure. Balance of weight of words and more words as image, with color and weight of line and mass, happens after contemplation then action, thought and reaction. One thing changes everything. All relationships are decided by trial and error, in the context, and environment. Everything happens in relationship to everything else. Word placement, line length next to line weight, color next to color, word next to image, and dark next to light—these are just a few components that cause weight shift and change. I consider all of these components consciously all the time. Experience, trial and error, and then instinct takes over. But the work itself directs me and tells me what it needs and wants.

A merging in the first work completed in the series DRIFTS is a combination of two pages. From the paper bookwork, 6 WATER VOICES, 35 mm slides of pages #4. PUDDLING and #5. PROCRASTINATE, were scanned into the Imac computer and were set one on top and another below. Sections were changed.  Words and images were added; a new work evolved.

drift again, 2003, MRR, 200 dpiDRIFT AGAIN, size variable, visual poetry/drawing/virtual collage

Variations of the original complex virtual collage follow now, with a letter or two, or an object added. Each offshoot, manifestation, is altered slightly, evolved, and is slightly different, with a different title – DRIFTS, DRIFT HERE, and DRIFT AGAIN. All happened while I remembered, seeing/hearing the sound of the country stream/river/creek  next to my  window, heard again in the city sounds. Daily reminders of water in its various forms and containers inform my thinking. Water towers imply water contained, water towers reflect on the water surface; my environment, reality adds images/layers to the work, that is now in virtual reality.

listen hear water voices 2002LISTEN-HEAR, about 12.50″h x 32 “w, visual poem/drawing, facing pages

As well, from 6 WATER VOICES, created as facing pages using stencils, ink pens, brush and gouache, plus misc. media, is LISTEN-HEAR.  Parts of the pages in the entire bookwork were written and rewritten first as lists/prose over months of word working. The stencils’ outlines were marked first with graphite on acid free paper, and often changed or corrected before the gouache was used. Color was selected while thinking of both water at various depths and times of day and year, and the sound of both shallow and rushing water. The brush size and collage were carefully and intuitively informed selections, depending on size and hue and  color value needed. All happened while remembering the stream’s gurgling sound again, in the city’s humming. Water: there in the rivers and rain, and imagined inside the multiple water tanks sitting on the buildings.

REST, 2009-10, MRR, 200 DPIREST, was 37″h x 48″w*, visual poem/drawing, facing page.

OR WORK, 2010, 200 dpi, MRROR WORK, was 37″h x 48″w, visual poem/drawing, facing page.

Each title REST and OR WORK took almost a year. The words are the image, and the image is the word.  The word REST filled a large piece of paper then was circled and nested with images and  words, back and forth, around the page as needed. The words OR WORK were done the same way later, on another sheet. Content was based on my life (always eggs/birth, growth/continuation, and mouse/the uninvited always returning), and while working on other things.  Although individual works, these two were created as a pair. Their edges fit together, either one on the right or left, or one above and the other below.  Largely from colored pencil over graphite outline with created and purchased stencils, on watercolor washes, the works grew ground up, changing  balance in sections, and weight in areas.  Except in their photos and in altered images in virtual reality, the experimental works no longer exist in the real world.

NVW: The term “asemic writing” was new to me, but now I’m seeing it everywhere. Language that is without semantic content. It looks like language, but we cannot glean a precise meaning. Could you speak a little about how you see this sort of language functioning in your own work?

MRR: In works without any words at all, the reading sensation still exists.  There are a variety of works or part of works that contain what seems to be indecipherable language as calligraphic type marks. I think of them as records of events or talks to the dead and newborn in a language only they will understand. They are in groups living in the context of their page and bookwork. They are language before language; they feel as if they are the same as reading poems in a foreign land in its language. They are thoughts marked in code, my thoughts, my code. The sound is like a hum, a whisper, or jazz scatting. The visual shapes and placement of the marks, in combinations, make the mass and color, the rhythm and pacing. My abstract language is almost never made with repeated sections or combinations since a new read/sound always happens in each cluster.

etcExcerpt detail from page 16 from the edition etceteras 
 

NVW: There often seems an ongoing narrative moving through your books. So do you think of them in some ways as novels or a series of visual poems?

MRR: Life’s situations in combinations, and the observation of the dying and death experience, have been highlighted during the turn of the century in my works: birth and life; before birth and after death; the past/memories; dead hopes and satisfied joys of life and living it intensely make up the content. Abstracted narrative is often included. Diaries and lists are often here as visual poetry, often in unbound or bound artists’ books or bookworks. Dense and intense, some of the works have the qualities involved in ritual and meditative objects. The pages are sequential, for sure. Often the bookworks have a beginning and a middle, and then begin again—cyclical, or spiral—like the circle or egg.  The two continuous shapes so often are in my works. Read the book first and at the end, turn it over, read again, and a new work emerges, one experiences it all differently. There is the fragmented circle, the broken unity and hesitations in continuity rather than that complete circle. One or more themes runs through a series or one bookwork that often has its later individual visual poems or artists’ stamp sheet commemorative. Each work or series has its own feelings portrayed and impressions in marks on paper, or in the computer image.  From the one image of a work, and seeing only one open folio or standing bookwork in exhibition, the visual is there but the verbal and theme are often hidden, waiting to be read/seen, the sequence totally lost. The image frustrates the reader/viewer since the actual is not there to see, to see what went before or after; the same frustration, or greater, is in an exhibition when the item is so close but still unapproachable, untouchable, although a complete section is shown.  This method both irritates and/or excites the reader/viewer’s appetite for more. What does this say about me, that I like to tease or agitate the viewer/reader? But that reader/viewer who holds the work in her/his hands is usually greatly satisfied while reading and seeing, and knowing the content and having the book’s secrets.

OPEN HOUSE, 1990, MRR, pp 10-11, 200 dpiOPEN HOUSE, closed 8 1/2” h x 5 1/2”w, especially pages 10-11 with the scissors collage, photo copy edition visual poetry artists’ book with movable collage. Edition 100, printed with five different photo printers.

NVW: How has your work changed the most over the years? And/or, how is what you’re working on now a departure from earlier work?

MRR: The only way to know what was and is now is to compare earlier works with later pieces, but I am not as objective about my works as I may often be about the works of others.

I think that my work is more available and open for interpretation and not as hidden and mysterious in content as it once was.

My long workdays cannot go on for weeks at a time anymore. Workdays replace weeks, and part days for full days, so concentration is broken. The body will not cooperate; time goes, much is not done, less work produced.

Different studio spaces change my works’ themes and size.

Although using the computer and copy machine for decades, to use as collage materials or to create editions, now I find I almost never use the copy machine.

For years, almost always my own publisher, now others invite me to publish my editions and I try to follow each of the size, page number, and shape and paper formats they need. They sometimes slightly edit or make minor suggestions, as in all collaborations I have done before.

Before my theme concerned a younger woman’s life experiences and thinking and young family; now the sources are an old woman’s.

Maybe the work is less complex, I am not sure.  But the angst and playfulness are there still, maybe redirected.

DOCKAGE, 2007, MRR, 200 dpiDOCKAGE, 16 “h x 14 3/4” w, visual poetry/drawing; master for a few prints of various sizes, image altered for stamp sheet edition

—Marilyn R. Rosenberg & Nance Van Winckel

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Marilyn R. Rosenberg was born in Philadelphia, PA. In 1978 she completed a Bachelor of Professional Studies in Studio Arts at Empire State College, State U of NY and in 1993 a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York U. While raising a family she continued creating works on paper. Her studies included painting, graphics, sculpture, a variety of other art, gender, history, literature, and religious studies, life drawing, advertising art, advertising publication, book and printing production (older style), book arts and more. Since 1977 she has amassed a body of work consisting of more than 600 titles that include visual poems, artists’ books, mail art, drawings, small press/chap books, unique sculptural bookworks, artists’ stamps, photos, paste on paper and computer collages, and other works.

Her art is included in public collections or archives at Harvard University, Fine Arts Lib., Fogg Art Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Brown University Library, Dartmouth College, The Tate Gallery, and many others. Her works are also in such anthologies as LAST VISPO ANTHOLOGY: Visual Poetry 1998 – 2008, Fantagraphics Books, 2012 and 500 HANDMADE BOOKS: INSPIRING INTERPRETATIONS OF A TIMELESS FORM, New York, Lark Books, 2008.

Just last year (2012) her work appeared in the following exhibitions:

  • 2012, FEMINISM AND THE ARTIST’S BOOK, Vespa Properties, Brooklyn, NY, Curator: Maddy Rosenberg for Central Booking Gallery.
  • 2012, POINT OF VIEW, juried invitational, WCC Gallery, Peekskill, NY. Jury and Curators: Sherry Mayo, Geoff Feder & Larry D’Amico.
  • 2012, VISUAL POERY EXHIBIT, General Store Community Arts Center, Mount Barker, South Australia.
  • 2012, REJOICE, Ceres Artist Friends Exhibition, New York, NY.
  • 2012, MINUTE Web exhibit,The University of Northampton, UK. Curators: Melanie Bush, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design The University of Northampton, UK and Dr Emma Powell, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. http://www.flickr.com/photos/61714195@N00/7408594342
  • 2011-2012, WRITE-NOW, The Chicago Rooms Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Illinois, USA. Curator: Keith A. Buchholz.
  • 2011-2012, Apocryphal, Traditional, et al, Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville GA, USA. Curators: Shannon Morris and John Coffelt.

More of her work may be viewed at:

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Nance Van Winckel is the author of six collections of poems, including After A Spell, winner of the 1999 Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry, and the recently released Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2013). She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Recent poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review.

She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and a recent recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. Her stories have been published in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Kenyon Review. Boneland, her fourth collection of fiction, is forthcoming in October from U. of Oklahoma Press.

She is Professor Emerita in Eastern Washington University’s graduate creative writing program, as well as a faculty member of Vermont College of Fine Arts’ low-residency MFA program. She lives near Spokane, Washington with her husband, the artist Rik Nelson.

Click this link to see a collectionof Nance Van Winckel’s mash-ups of poetry and photography, which she calls photoems.