Art and poetry meet at Sheppard art gallery
Poetry and art enthusiasts took every chair and sat on the floor of the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery Tuesday night so they could hear poet Ann Lauterbach read her work. Lauterbach’s reading was part of a larger exhibit, “Whole Fragment,” inspired by her essay “As is: Toward a Poetics of the Whole Fragment.”Lauterbach’s essay explores the idea that life is a series of fragments. The works of nine artists were chosen because of their relation to the poems. Pieced together, paintings and sculptures framed the exhibition. Intricate designs looked overwhelming to the eye close up but striking when viewed in their entirety.
“There’s a wholeness in fragmentation,” Curator, Marjorie Vecchio said. “Differences create this sort of beauty.”
A splintered tire sculpture on the wall by Chakaia Booker cast an intricate shadow behind it. A piece by Polly Apfelbaum was pasted on the floor like a mat – she combined separate, blindingly orange cartoon flowers into a pattern that looked like 1970s wallpaper.
Artist Jennilie Brewster created a hybrid painting-sculpture that filled an entire side of a room in Sheppard.
Sunset-colored blotches are interrupted by small canvas paintings and newspaper clippings. The newspaper progressively takes over the paint. They eventually clash into a massive pile of rubbish in the corner of the room. There are wads of newspaper everywhere, bags of paper, an old dresser on its back, and small glints of light reflecting off packing tape. It ends in complete chaos.
“It’s a sort of crisis piece,” Brewster said.
Lauterbach stood in front of this chaotic piece for her reading. She started with “Freefall,” a poem of seemingly random words that created a pulsating rhythm. The poem resembles rambling thoughts of people, laid within a form similar to that of the rhythmic precision of poet Langston Hughes.
Her most striking poem was written soon after the attacks of Sept. 11. Lauterbach introduced the poem by recalling her apartment in New York, behind which a beautiful tree had been topped.
“Harm’s Way, Arm’s Reach” describes the attacks through the metaphor of the tree. She spoke of severed limbs and chaos. Here, Brewster’s painting-sculpture became part of the poem in an unintended way.
The strewn newspaper on the walls and floor looked similar to the rain of paper after the towers fell. At one point during the reading, an audience member told Lauterbach the wall fascinated him. She told him it was OK and to “get lost in the wall.”
Outside of Sheppard, a Tibetan scholar and Buddhist monk is creating a sand mandala for the exhibit. Losang Samten is creating the intricate circle of colored sand, meant to represent the impermanence of life, on the second floor of the Ansari Business building.
Lauterbach spoke of an idea called “limitspace.” She described it as the form that becomes the restriction in art and in our lives. The world is a mixture of random fragments and it is up to us to create our own limits.
“Form is always a way of making a limit happen in art,” she said.
She explained that in poetry, the limitspace is the rhyme scheme. She said her poetry is so rhythmically charged because she listens to a lot of music and analyzes how cadences work within it.
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October 23rd, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Wow! What a great picture! Simply brilliant :)
October 24th, 2007 at 11:30 am
What a lovely article, and very accurate to the experience of it.