The Book Beasts and Books as Visual Language exhibit went off so well at the end of the year… but I wanted to bring some of the impressive work from the show out from hiding and into the world. All of the work challenges how we read a text, what a poem is, what a book is, and how these things are changed by the act of making. It is poem-thing at its finest.

AIR MAIL I, 2010

Emily Viggiano

Assemblage: wooden frame, magazines, junk mail, newspaper

9 x 9 x 1.5″

“Air Mail” is a collage composed of only materials that were delivered in the mail on the first day of spring.  It is an exploration flight, of the promises of the exotic and the realities of the mundane.

Ellie Smith-Tipton
D.C. VOTING RIGHTS, 2010
Poem Object, acrylic, cap guns, found text
22 x 28″
The measure for the District of Columbia to receive a vote in Congress was killed by a gun-rights amendment that would have removed the city’s ability to regulate gun control. The District still employs a shadow representative, which the poem object attempts to capture visually. The text comes from the Washington Post article “District Voting Rights Scuttled” printed on April 21, 2010. The object explores the multiple layers of representation.

Jen Daniels, 2010
PENELOPE READS THE THREADS
altered book, cotton embroidery floss, ink
2’11’’ x 1’4’’

Twenty pages, one for each year of Odysseus’s journey, of the Butcher & Lang translation (1965) of The Odyssey that reference the Penelope subplot were reassembled using cotton embroidery floss. The superimposed poem references Penelope’s strategy to avoid remarrying in Odysseus’s long absence: she said she must first weave a shroud for her father-in-law; she wove it during the day and unwove it at night.

CENTER PEACE, 2010

Assemblage: three-tiered white cake; pink, green, and white frosting; bride and groom cake toppers; pearl dust; skeleton figurine

6.5”x10” diameter

This cake examines the façade of modern weddings and the expectations of modern marriage. From certain perspectives, the cake appears to be a traditional wedding cake, but from other angles, it spells out a different message.

Written on the tiers are the following circular poems:

not tie the not tie the

sweet bridle sweet bridle

something owed something owed

knew something knew something

the bouquet is catching the bouquet is catching