Author Archives: madeby18

Rona Pondick

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—click on any image to enlarge—

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Artist’s Statement

For the last 40 years I have worked with the body.

In the 1980’s I began working with objects and fragments that invoke the body- including shoes, baby bottles, and teeth – trying to make wholes that were suggestive and psychologically acute. In the late 1990’s I made my first hybrid sculptures, marrying my own body parts with animals and trees.

I often say that “I am a material- holic who thinks with my hands.” I like working with a wide range of materials, using both hand modeling and cutting-edge technologies. I see tradition, materiality, and technology as providing tools for my exploration of the imagistic, the metaphoric and the psychologically suggestive.

I’ve had a long love affair with Franz Kafka. For me, metamorphosis, hybridity, and transformation are central. I like to draw from art-historical, literary, and scientific references- from ancient Egyptian sphinxes and Ovid’s retelling of classical mythology in the Metamorphoses, to contemporary cloning technologies.

Across the last four decades, I have experimented with materials, techniques, processes, and imagery, focusing on relationships between biography and mythology, the psychological and the bodily, the uncanny and the familiar, trying to embody some of the emotional complexities of human existence.

Rona Pondick lives and works in New York City. Since 1984 she has had 52 solo exhibitions of her
work in museums and galleries internationally, including Galleria d’Arte Moderna Bologna, Italy; Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands; Rupertinum Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Salzburg, Austria; Cincinnati Art Museum; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; and Upper Belvedere, Vienna, Austria, among others. 

Her sculptures have been included in over 250 group exhibitions, including numerous biennales worldwide: the Whitney Biennial, Lyon Biennale, Johannesburg Biennale, Sonsbeek, and Venice Biennale. Pondick has participated in group exhibitions at museums internationally including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice; Museo de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Ca’Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France; Pera Museum, Istanbul; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Daimler Chrysler, Berlin; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many others. 

Her work is in 52 museum collections worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY); Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas); San Francisco Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art (Sculpture Garden); Toledo Museum of Art; The Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City); Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh); Ursula Blickle Stiftung (Kraichtal, Germany); Centre Pompidou (Paris); and The Israel Museum (Jerusalem). 

Pondick has received numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Cultural Department of the City of Salzburg, Kunstlerhaus, Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Mid-Atlantic Arts Grant, and others.

Ryan Mihaly

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Excerpts from “B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart”

[G♯/A♭] [Sarcasm]

ryan mihaly

[C] [A split second]

ryan mihaly

[D♯/E♭] [Vision: chaos of birds]

ryan mihaly

[G] [Vision: peace]

ryan mihaly

Currently based in Greenville, SC, Ryan Mihaly is a business manager at a farm-friendly grocery/cafe, a music teacher, a collage artist, and a poet. His work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Adirondack Review, DIAGRAM, Opossum, Asymptote, The Massachusetts Review, and in Ilan Stavans’ anthology On Self-Translation: Meditations on Language. After completing his MFA at Naropa University in 2018, where he was an Anne Waldman / Anselm Hollo fellow, he attended artist residencies in Ireland, Macedonia, and Slovakia, where some of these pieces were written.

Ryan Clark

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VII. [ vie ]

VIII. [ vie ]

These poems all come from my manuscript, “Arizona SB 1070: An Act,” which is a homophonic translation of the anti-immigration bill of the same name passed in Arizona in 2010. My method of homophonic translation relies on the re-sounding of a source text, letter by letter, according to the various possible sounds each letter is able to produce (ex: “cat” may become “ash” by silencing the ‘c’ as in “indict,” and by sounding the ’t’ as an ‘sh-‘ sound, as in “ratio”). These particular poems are translations of the 7th and 8th pages of the bill. As can be seen, the source text is present in gray above each translated line, so as to better show the poem as a rejection and rewriting of the bill.

Ryan Clark writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation and is particularly interested in how poetry responds to the oppressiveness of borders. He is the author of How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press, 2019), and his poetry has recently appeared in Bear Review, Yemasse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, and HOLD. He is a winner of the 2018 San Antonio Writers Guild contest, and his work has been nominated for Best of the Net. He currently teaches creative writing at Waldorf University in Iowa.

Joanna Fuhrman and Toni Simon

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The Ruler of Rusted Knees

THE RULER OF RUSTED KNEES

You were the king of all the abandoned bathtubs and I was the king of air/ space/ time/ questions unlucky fuzzy key chains and speech. Were you jealous? Um, sorry (?) I'm was never actually kidding. You were the king of all the abandoned bathtubs

and I was the king of air/space/ time/ questions

unlucky fuzzy key chains and speech.

Were you jealous?

Um, sorry (?)

I was never / actually kidding.
thoth3

 In the beginning, we made birds chirps translated into the language of broken chairs.

No one exactly understood us, so they called us wise.

This was before the bloody fedoras,

before the arrival of floating leaf territory.
rustedknees4

 Try to balance
like an idea,

like a balanced
idea, like the idea

of balance like
an idea balanced

on another idea,
on balanced ideas

on many ideas
balancing.
rustedknees5

 Back then—you were
the ruler of plastic wrap,

lost words and
radiators.

I was the ruler
of disobedient vowels,

folded origami-style
guidebooks.
rustedknees6

 A man with double eights
in his halo is lucky.

A man without a head and double eights
in his halo is unlucky.

Can a man have a halo without a head?
Can a haloed man be unlucky?

If a man is lucky and unlucky at once,
he is doubly unlucky and doubly lucky.

If you try to be lucky,
you’re unlucky.

If want to be unlucky,
you’re in luck!

thoth7

 In the beginning, we didn’t need to be friends with all the parts of ourselves.

It was enough to listen to the wind tear the world to pieces.

Later, the wind swallowed parts of ourselves we had no name for

but missed terribly.
rustedknees8

 We had happened in many
different somewheres,

and everywheres,
and were here now.

Like the taste of teeth
is here, or the migrating

space around a loose flag.

rustedkness9

 You can be the king
of whatever–the-hell

you believe
you are the king of.

Take light,
for example.

If you whispered to the light,
no one would

say you were
wrong to believe

its flashing was a product
of your will.
Artists’ Statement

In our mixed-media literary project, Egyptian gods, stripped of their context and role, wander various New York City neighborhoods trying to figure out where they belong, how to make sense of what they have lost, and how to get along with one another.

In the first step of our project, Toni Simon constructs three-dimensional, small-scale figurines out of paper, modeled on Egyptian gods. She then paints them with abstract, graphic details. We then take the little gods out into different neighborhoods and take hundreds of photographs of them. We select eight to ten images, which become the basis for a series of poems written by Joanna Fuhrman.

So far, we have created picture/poem serial combinations in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Chinatown, the Reversible Destiny Studio, Red Hook and Gowanus (featured here). Parts of the project have appeared online in paperbag and Talisman and in print in the 100th issue of Hanging Loose.

Toni Simon is a multimedia artist living in Brooklyn. Her illustrated book of prose poetry “Earth After Earth” was published by Lunar Chandelier Press in 2012. Over 80 of her illustrations appear in “Contradicta: Aphorisms” (Green Integer, 2010) by Nick Piombino. She has exhibited her drawings at the Drawing Center and at the AIR Gallery in NYC. http://tonisimonart.blogspot.com

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently “Pageant” (Alice James Books 2009) and “Moraine” (Hanging Loose Press 2006), as well as the chapbook “The Emotive Function” (Least Weasel Press 2011). She teaches poetry writing at Rutgers University and through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Other sections of her project with Toni appear online at paperbag and Tailsman and in print in the journal Hanging Loose. For more see: Joannafuhrman.com