still from Revision by Julia Willms
detail from site specific installation by Quinn Krauss-Sanders
detail of Josephine by Turner Davis
Device for Making Words by Peter Ciccariello
Vispo
What would a Conceptual Poetry Symposium be without a nod to Vispo – the visual poetry movement that seems to be exponentially expanding its definition by constantly incorporating new, or if not new, at least more types of media, including digital, video, film, sculpture, typography, theater and book/e-zine arts?
Some exciting conceptual visual work will be on display here at the Poetry Center during the symposium including three pieces from a recent exhibition at Harvard of the work of Peter Ciccariello, a “landscape poet,” who, using 3-D imaging software, begins a layering process that results in “images that are a palimpsest of private and personal visual reminiscences, part real, part illusion, part poetry, part photograph, part painting, and part sculpture.”
The work of Julia Willms, an artist from Germany now living in Vienna, will also be featured. Willms’ installations question traditional theater and in fact provide a new understanding of how language and visual art can play. By creating a new structure from the building blocks of architecture, video, sound, repetition and sequencing, Willms creates a multi-layered surface to create an implied text.
There will also be a chance for an up-close viewing of the book art of Turner Davis, a treasured Arizona painter. Davis is currently represented by Riva Yares Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Studio 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The University of Arizona Museum of Art featured his work in February. Davis says of his work, “My pictures all fall on a narrative continuum. On one end is a direct and simple telling of a story through an image. On the other end, the story is composed of fragments and is only really complete in the mind of the viewer. I like both and everything in between.”
The Conceptual Poetry symposium will also be informed more deeply by the mixed media art of the students of UA professor Barbara Penn. The corners of the Poetry Center are being addressed, interfered with, covered over and lifted up to help us re-consider space and language as it affects and magnifies “meaning.”
Some of the other artists that will be represented at the Symposium are mixed media visual poet David Baptiste-Chirot and documentary filmmaker Jonathon Van Ballenberghe.
by Annie Guthrie
