Erica Baum

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Posit Editor

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

My photographic work utilizes found language and imagery. As an undergraduate I studied Anthropology and I look at my source materials, books, blackboards, card catalogues, player piano rolls, sewing patterns etc. as potent artifacts that can yield poetic information reflecting the circulation and dissemination of information and material in our shared popular culture. I’m thinking about structures and systems and how a playful engagement can yield insights as well as generate new meanings.

Transposing the tradition of street photography, I navigate intuitively framing and partially decontextualizing my subject matter harnessing moments that suggest meanings beyond their original situations.

What interests me are the juxtapositions and sense of history derived from the words themselves even without knowing everything. I want to give you a sense of a particular environment but not in its entirety. The view is oblique and re-contextualized. In this close up immersive situation the viewer can retain a level of awareness, just enough to inform but also to allow a different visual and semantic experience to take hold. The source is familiar and recognizable but the experience is new. It is that tension between something that we recognize, that we routinely encounter and the fact that we can look at it in a different way that creates a strangeness, a difference in which exist multiple possibilities.

While respecting the constraints of a given subject, the page sequence of a book or the reference system of a library, the work suggests a visual meta-language, mixing history and humor to display the disparate, often unheard cacophony of voices present within cultural structures.

Reflecting intimate and direct encounters with familiar actions and objects – opening a card catalogue drawer, opening a book, folding a page – the viewer is reminded that meaningful visual surprise surrounds us if one pays attention.

Erica Baum is well known for her varied photographic series capturing text and image in found printed material, from paperback books to library indexes. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984.

Recent museum exhibitions include Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Face à face, frac île‐de‐france, Villetaneuse, France; Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, The New York Public Library, New York; The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Lever le voile, Frac île‐de‐france, Paris; The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, The Jewish Museum, New York; Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Kunsthalle Berlin and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Recent solo and two‐person exhibitions include A METHOD OF A CLOAK, Square is the Chatter, Galerie Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf; A METHOD OF A CLOAK, Klemm’s, Berlin; A Long Dress, Bureau, New York; Naked Eye Nature Morte, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, France; AAa:Quien, Erica Baum & Libby Rothfeld, Bureau, New York; The Following Information, Bureau, New York; and Stanzas, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris. Selected biennials include: AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013 and the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012.

Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MAMCO, Geneva; Albright‐ Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and others.

Rick Pieto

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Posit Editor

Glitch Poems

The Glitch Poems are in the tradition of visual poetry. Each glitch poem contains, at its core, several traditional poems. These conventional poems are improperly mixed and conveyed with – some intentional, some random – visual symbols, numbers and letters. This inappropriate incorporation of visual and literary elements create a text that is poetic but also a site where noise and interference scramble the reliability of the traditional poetic text and its meanings. Furthermore each poem is printed numerous times creating surfaces that produce a density that denigrates the integrity and clarity of the stand-alone traditional poem. Each glitch poem – with its mixture of words, symbols and letters – creates a powerful graphic statement that at the same time hinders the typical act of reading by creating a seemingly illegible surface that sets up innumerable texts that appear as our eyes glance over the page combining words, phrases and graphic symbols into fortuitous new poems.

Rick Pieto is a visual poet and writer living in the Silver Spring, Maryland area. His visual poetry has been exhibited at Rhizome DC and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and published in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, fields, Midway Journal, 805: Lit + Art and Minetta Review. His poetry has been published in The Big Windows Review and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. He received a PhD in media ecology from New York University and has taught at Georgetown University and the University of Baltimore.

Ryan Mihaly

Posted on January 15, 2020 by madeby18

Excerpts from “B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart”

[G♯/A♭] [Sarcasm]

[C] [A split second]

[D♯/E♭] [Vision: chaos of birds]

[G] [Vision: peace]

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.

hiromi suzuki

Posted on May 19, 2019 by Posit Editor

Eternal Relations

The Japanese language is comprised of Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana. Kanji are also Chinese characters, and the same Kanji may have different meanings, shapes, and pronunciations in Chinese and Japanese. In Eternal Relations, I use their Japanese versions. In a sense, Kanji are hieroglyphs. By using Kanji, we can draw every natural phenomenon and mental scene with one letter. It is itself visual poetry. In Japanese culture, the short poem known as haiku evokes nature and daily life. In the same way, by using kanji, I evoke the eternal loop between nature and time, their ‘eternal relations.’

hiromi suzuki is a poet and artist living in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Ms. cried, 77 poems by hiromi suzuki (kisaragi publishing, 2013), logbook (Hesterglock Press, 2018) and INVISIBLE SCENERY (Low Frequency Press, 2018). Her works are published internationally in Otoliths, BlazeVOX, Empty Mirror, Hotel, Burning House Press, DATABLEED, MOONCHILD MAGAZINE, talking about strawberries all of the time, Mookychick, Coldfront, RIC Journal, 3:AM Magazine, The Cerurove, A) GLIMPSE) OF), and so on.

Sonja Johanson

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Posit Editor

Gneiss

At least
reinvent
destiny
tatters
within geological strata
toss them into
a billion
little
days
All of them

erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p.10
Pinnae segments from fertile fronds, Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis

Divinity

choose
to
fall into
quantum physics
tracing the path of particles
within
this
brimming world
this
empire of paper
zeal

erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p. 470
simple leaves, Pincushion Moss, Leucobryum glaucum

Bradbury

orange
black
mixed and ready,
dying in the air.
a discreet
cleft.
night,
came again,
dark and distinct,

erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p. 120
capsules and berries, Japanese Spindle and Privet, Euonymous japonica and Ligustrum compactum

This series of erasures use the Anne Rice novel Taltos as their source text. I elected to perform these erasures using plant materials as a way of celebrating and mourning our current ecological state; the breakneck speed of climate change and globalization is easily observed by those working in horticulture and conservation. These plants represent both native plants that are threatened by habitat loss and the non-natives that are replacing them. In selecting materials for these erasures, I looked for plants that were accessible in the New England landscape during the month of October, and sought diversity of form, texture, colour, and botanical structures.

Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in THRUSH, Bellevue Literary Review, and American Life in Poetry. She is a contributing editor at the Eastern Iowa Review, and the author of Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press), and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine. Follow her at sonjajohanson.net.

Buzz Spector

Posted on September 13, 2018 by Posit Editor

in modern America (2014)

important parts of religious experience (2014)

not even (2015)

the eternal mystery in pictures (2014)

the shadows’ touch . . . (2016)

Artist’s Statement

For the last five years I’ve been making text/image sequences of poetry employing found language on the dust jackets of hardcover books. I clip the last lines of blurbs to compose poetry. These last words, so to speak, are vestiges of writing which is itself deliberately ordinary in function. We are all too aware of the deception of buying a book after reading a blurb more engaging than the volume it’s wrapped around. I’m taking up the challenge of writing as collage from such meager shards, bringing variations of color, typography, and bits of images into the process.

Buzz Spector works in a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, printmaking, book arts, and installation. His art makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception.

Helen Hofling

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Posit Editor

from Tender the Night

Artist’s Statement

This collection takes its title from a famous novel, with a notable redaction. When “is” is cut out, “tender” is transformed from adjective—meaning caring, gentle, sweet—to verb: to tender is to offer, proffer, present. Night becomes currency. The collage-poems assembled here depend on just this style of phase change: excision reaping lateral transformation. The novel Tender is the Night redacts and reorganizes the experience of its muse, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. These scraps muse on roaring nights, given and profited from, pilfering mass media, art, the vault of my life and the lives of near ones, poking around the basement of theft and offer.

Helen Hofling writes, collages, and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work can be found (or soon will) in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Columbia Review, Hobart, PANK, Prelude, Winter Tangerine, and elsewhere.

David Felix

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Posit Editor

Notational

Very Portent

Location

Nowhere Here

David Felix is an English visual poet who lives in Denmark. For fifty years or so his writing has taken on a variety of forms, in collage, three dimensions, in galleries, anthologies, festival performances and video and in over forty publications worldwide, both in print and online. As the child of artists, magicians and tailors he has inherited a workroom furnished with a fume hood solvent disposal system, an escape cabinet and a 120-spool thread rack.

Nicolette Wong & David Heg

Posted on December 12, 2017 by Posit Editor

The Classroom

You have left for tomorrow
like the rhythm of rust

reverberating through
the blinds—darting,

gasping, fleeing the day
we pressed our hearts

against the glitter
of wisdom, our being

choked on a voiceless
command—be still,

be pliant, be the words
translucent as dust.

The Waiting Room

It must be rain inside the walls. The rain of a child’s cries, a red swing against the grey sweetness of sky. A hollow to stifle, rocking in the cold front. Of ciphers discarded on the doorsteps, lips bleeding into porcelain shards to let live. Come back, come back, to the call of faceless drinkers pleading for histories, in a room of dust singed by erasure. For I will wait, I will wait to touch their voices, punctured by rain.

Nicolette Wong is the editor in chief of A-Minor Magazine & Press. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Escape Into Life, Thrush Poetry Journal and other venues.

David Heg is a photographer and educator currently manifesting in the wooded hills of eastern CT. His work has appeared on the cover of Nicolette Wong’s poetry chapbook, Stone Bride Madrigals, and the online zines, Negative Suck, Dark Chaos, A-Minor Magazine, Revolution John and Otoliths.

Leanne Staples

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Posit Editor

leanne-staples-correspondences-edit

correspondences

you. yourself. a beginner. your metaphor leaks of thingness.
easing into selfness. slipping behind the comfort of furniture.
so safe. a gate. it absorbs your being, whole. welcomes you in.
will you go through it? will you go through with it?

a woman. in dark. mist clouded. ambiguously tousled.
the effect of a comfortable position grows on you.
as does the k/not knowing. there is comfort in the known.
and the not known.

your red event almost went unnoticed.
receding into the material. into the metaphor.
not wanting to be noticed. not waiting.
or weighting. without noun or renown.

a distribution of clouds. on the surface. on the face of it.
forming function. as a condition. in the shape of an organ.
the metaphysics of black. the elegance.
the mysteries of the k/night.

II.

smooth + loose. loosely loose. an undecided position. the urge to understand the empty space. the void. to stand under. single + slippery. an ambiguous entity. lacking definition. like the wind. you can feel it. hugging your being. yet it’s invisible. nowhere to be seen. strewn + dear. a thin existence. ethereal + alone. thin air. hither + thither. a slack scat. weightless + gold. lively adrift + scattered. unattached + open. self multiplying. a layered cosmic joke. a tiered cake. a comedy within a tragedy. or a tragedy within a comedy. a commedia. an anarchic media. a slippery medium. a humble thought. come-hither. come liberates. dressed in crushed velvet. till breathing feels like laughing. being.

III.

i echo & bounce. resound elsewhere. in another place. dropping stitches. in a row. loosely + behind veils. broad casting. along the way. stripping + direct. somewhere in space. what was the question? redefining. shifting + multiplying. again. white flecks. miniatures. strewn + dear. three angles. only slightly overlapping. almost not meeting. loose + elegant. words return to their beginning. leave us speechless. silent + precious. reenter their wombs. when there were fifty words for tears. layers shed. falling back in. directly reflecting beyond.

IV.

id/entity. gathered into small visuals. strapped into self image. on a diet. stripping + same. corseted + named. leaking psyche. weightless + gold. hieroglyphics in vials. funny foes + fauxs. shrinking picture. signs on the streets. omens. logos. logos. holding back. slowing down. dissolving + fizzing. withering wind. a number replaced the pronoun. without noun or renown. yes, I repeat myself. I am repetition. no name now. generic brand. it’s all the same. truth is radical love. it fucks the rules. loosens the restraints. grasping the picture. you reappear. revenir. rêve. re/come in a dream.

a bed of borrowed ease. crisply. a transition into a smooth stance. a reaction to the shift. doing it again. just because. just because. plagiarizing my self. self imitation. self limitation. care for things not mine. a curious curator of stolen postures. assumed position. touch without touching. the residue of things misunderstood. loosely ruffled. and crumpled. a calculated pose. amongst trees. blended + lax. ideas on loan. slide into comfort. a smoky refrain. a Satie background. slipping into place. a groove. shifting + multiplying. situated in luxury. in after effects. on a sun day. a down comforter.
correspondences

Leanne Staples (leannestaples.com) has been writing and taking photographs since the age of 12. Her goal is to create pictures that invoke words and words that invoke pictures. This is her first publication. She would like to thank her muse, who knows who he is.

Posit

A journal of literature and art

Category Archives: Text + Image

Erica Baum