Description
Poetry. Art. CONCORDANCE is a new collaborative work by three acclaimed contemporary artists: poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and sculptor Kiki Smith, working with book artist, Anne McKeown. Inspired by Smith's image of a dandelion, whose floating silks she compares to reading, the poem traces agreements and embeddings of human and animal bodies, ideas, dreams and emotion in a concordance of parallel and contingent contexts. "Then it's possible to undo misunderstanding from inside by tracing the flight or thread of empty space running through things." Then what if, in that bond, "images were Eros as words?" In Smith's etchings, reading, as Eros, is drawn as seeds, feathers, star-like explosions, pods, wide-eyed, unblinking owls. "Animals...open their eyes, and a mirror forms on the ground." The effects of the verbal images and gray-blue inked drawings are stunning and other-worldly.
Author Bio
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing, China, grew up in Massachusetts, and lives in rural New Mexico and New York City. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2006), CONCORDANCE (Kelsey Street Press, 2006), NEST (Kelsey Street Press, 2003), EMPATHY (Barrytown/Station Hill Press, 1989), and FOUR YEAR OLD GIRL (Kelsey Street Press, 1998).
Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in New Jersey. She has exhibited her work since the 1980s, when she was a member of COLAB, an influential artists' collective in New York City. Her work is represented in museums throughout Europe and the United States. A major retrospective of her prints, "Prints, Books and Things," took place at the Museum of Modern Art, 2003. The Walker Art Museum organized a major survey retrospective of her oeuvre in 2006. Smith lives and works in New York City.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA