Saturday, July 14, 2018

I Have a Lovely Problem

The Blues

The Riverside Community Art Association Gallery in Riverside, California is hosting a show, to be called Writers Who Art, Artists Who Write. If you are someone like me who writes and who goes visual by photo, this makes an opportunity to let one modality speak to the other. The projects are to be in the form of a diptych of 11 x 14 boards with the work arrayed on them. Lisa Henry, one of the organizers and the one who so graciously invited me to participate, agreed that thinking of the whole as a multi-media chapbook was a useful conceptualization.

At first I thought of the photos mainly as illustrations of the poems. Then I realized that the poems could be expansions of the photos. I have occasionally been asked to contribute photos to accompany pieces of other people's writing, and I have thought of it as showing a mood. The whole process makes it clear to me that I am, fundamentally, expressively more verbal than visual. Still, I wanted the entire diptych to make the viewer look from one thing to another, and to find that one thing commented on the others. A completely different way of thinking and proceeding and making choices for me, and I really appreciated it. The diptychs will be coming home at the end of next week, and I'll try to take decent photos of them and post them here.