Finished installing the frontroom gallery with poems and photographs from UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS. The first open studio I will be here for is on November 10, part of a neighborhood art walk sort of thing. While I'm in Pittsburgh, there will also be an art auction in this wing of the building and I imagine we'll get some traffic from that event as well. If you're in the Dallas or Arlington or Fort Worth area, feel free to drop in and check the work out any time. The gallery is technically always open. Just knock. There's also a great exhibition going on in the building right now in the Jeanette Kennedy Gallery - work by PhD candidate Steve Hallas.

I have been busy with preparing two talks that I will be giving at the University of Pittsburgh next week. It's hard work finding the language to talk about one's work - I think I was lucky in Chicago, in that my photography teachers, particularly Aimee, heavily emphasized the importance of being able to talk about your work and to think clearly about issues of presentation. Aimee by the way has some new and interesting work in the print version of Chicago's Polvo Magazine (unfortunately the images aren't on-line at the Polvo site yet), or you can view her work at Carl Hammer. I am totally looking forward to spending time at the Art Institute (my 2nd home while in grad school!) and the galleries in River North. I haven't been back since 2000. Here is the transcript of one of the talks I will be giving in Pittsburgh which is an overview of my development as an artist:

Poetry: A Dialogue with the Visual Arts

For my lecture today, I will talk about the development of my sensibilities as a poet impacted by and working across disciplines. I will give an overview of my work over the past five years starting with a few poems from my poetry collection, EQUIVALENCE and progressing to two recent visual text projects I have been involved with.

My first collection of poems, EQUIVALENCE (La Alameda, 2003) took as one of its major themes the connection between visual arts and language. I started writing the poems in this book as early as 1999, when I was a student in the MFA writing program based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the time that I enrolled at the Art Institute I was very interested in the idea of the translation between visual and textual languages. My earliest poems were largely narrative in nature and attempted to work out some of my concerns around cultural identity. THE GATHERING AT THE ORCHID PAVILION was one of the first poems I ever wrote based on the visual arts. I gave myself the assignment to choose a piece of art in the Art Institute’s collections to write about and ended up in Gallery 109 of the museum – this is a special gallery that was commissioned from TADAO ANDO, a Japanese architect. Ando was asked to build a room to house the Museum’s Japanese screens and antiquities – Ando constructed an environment which created a division of space thru the use of pillars which act as a both solid and negative screen, allowing the experience of the viewer to slowly take shape and unfold before them. I went into the gallery at a time when I knew when there would be little traffic with the intent of writing a poem on a folding screen called THE GATHERING AT THE ORCHID PAVILION showcased behind the glass. As I started sketching out notes, two people entered the gallery and very quickly became a part of the life of my poem.

After I graduated from the Art Institute, I moved down to Dallas, Texas in 2000 to take a job as a museum educator at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Working in the museum, I came into contact with many visiting artists and had the opportunity to listen to both artists and curators speak on the artistic process. Being in this environment had a major impact on my sensibilities and built upon my interests from grad school. When the painter JOHN POMARA exhibited his series of drip paintings at the museum, he came did a talk for the museum in which he described in great detail his process for creating his DEADLINE series. Like the AB-EX painters, Pomara works with dripping and pouring paint over his canvases which he works with on the floor. Over time, Pomara became interested in the paint drippings falling off of his canvases and experimented with enlarging these drips on a photocopier and moving these patterns around. He than took these Xeroxes and scanned them into his computer, photoshopped them and re-output them to use as studies for his paintings. In thinking about Pomara’s way of using paint drips, I began to see connections between paint and physical language, words and how they are and can be used on a page. I wrote the poem “feedback” as a response to Pomara’s work – both as a dialogue with the artist, but also playing on Pomara’s interest in punk rock music, sound waves and pattern, i.e. the feedback and distortion of a electric guitar.

As part of my work at the Museum, I worked with finding ways to use language and creative writing to help visitors better connect with works of art. When a Mondrian exhibition was mounted at the DMA, I played around with creating writing exercises off of Mondrian’s paintings. From the research done at Harvard on Mondrian’s work, x-raying his paintings and looking at the layers of paint on the canvases, we know that despite the seeming simplicity of Mondrian’s works, Mondrian actually radically revised his paintings, sometimes over a period of several years – cutting in to the paintings, drawing and crossing out lines and moving things around until he arrived at a perfect harmony of line, color and shape. I thought of the idea of creating a writing exercise that would help the viewer visualize Mondrian’s revision process –Actually moving letters and words around on a page to achieve a similar harmony of meaning and sense thru language. I tested out the exercise on myself and came up with the poem M O N D R I A N (eye-rhyme, 2002).

I started writing more poems based on works of art I was coming into contact with and began to shape the manuscript for EQUIVALENCE. The centerpiece of this book is a poem called EQUIVALENT which is based on a work by Felix Gonzales-Torres but also references ALFRED STIEGLITZ. Stieglitz was in addition to being one of the Modernist photographers of the last century, also a publisher and gallery owner – someone deeply engaged in a conversation with artists from other disciplines. Stieglitz’s major work is his series the EQUIVALENTS – the EQUIVALENTS are studies of the sky, cloud images which Stieglitz likened to a living experience of the sky. Stieglitz was deeply interested in the idea of the connection between the arts and actual life, and idea that I deeply identify with and an analogy that I wanted to make between visual and textual language. Gonzales-Torres was a photographer and installation artist most active in the 1980s. He was interested in using everyday materials in his work and the idea of the democratization of art. He was probably best known for 2 types of works – stack piles and candy pieces. The stack pieces were mass produced poster sheets printed with an image by the artist which would be displayed in a gallery in a pile. The viewer would be invited to peel away a layer of this artwork and take it home with him. The idea being that everyone should have the chance to make a direct and personal connection with a work of art, literally take ownership of their experience with an artwork. The candy piles worked on a similar premise. A viewer could come and choose a piece of candy and take it away with them – subverting the visitor’s expectation of the artwork and museum experience. The one thing that is important to know about the candy piles is that in many cases, Gonzales-Torres designed these works as “portraits” of people in his life whom he loved. The first candy pile he executed was for his lover Ross who later died of AIDS, as did Gonzales-Torres. In writing my poem EQUIVALENT, I was less concerned with making a mimetic analog (i.e. my MONDRIAN piece) and more interested in capturing what I felt was at the heart of the translation between ideas and languages, a simultaneous duality and oneness.

I finished working on the manuscript for EQUIVALENCE in 2003, while on residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH. Around that time, I met one my current collaborators, FERENC SUTO who is a fine art photographer working in New York. Ferenc was on residency developing a series of photographs he called “FACE OFF SPOTS IN NEUTRAL ZONES”. The images were of young models outfitted in ill-fitting sports gear, looking oppressed, pained, and extremely uncomfortable. The images struck a chord with me, how the work dealt with the role of sports in adolescent socialization and the development of gender and sexuality, and the notion of tribe. Ferenc was interested in finding a way to incorporate language into his project. He had been photographing enlarged photocopied phrases from vintage sports manuals full of loaded vocabulary like “unnecessary roughness”, “choking”, “holding”, and “banishment” and experimenting with ways to display this language alongside his images. I became obsessed with the word play and multiple meanings inherent in the language that Ferenc was using and began to play around with writing poems using sports language. The first pieces I wrote were called “2 minute minor” and “5 minute major” (Daschund, 2003).

I liked the idea of putting the poems in a grid, or “penalty box”, a format in which the words could be read in any direction, horizontally, vertically. Here are a few more images of FERENC’s work. Over the past year, I have played around with the idea of using the playing fields of sports and games as structures for poems. Roller derby, dodgeball, four square.. the last poem I wrote for this series "The Wet Area" accompanies a Polaroid collage of a swimmer and uses the field of a swimming pool. We renamed this series “UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS”. I have had to make sense of why as a female Asian American poet I should respond so deeply to artwork about sports who’s primary interest is to explore issues of gender and power – I realize that for me the work is ultimately about “fitting in”.

My most recent project is a collaboration with New York painter DAVID LUKOWKSI (see blog links or visit www.davidlukowski.com). I was drawn to David’s work for his interest in text – many of his paintings embed language into their surfaces. This first image is called “Good Morning Institute of Health Professionals” – David worked as an administrator for a big medical school in the Boston area which was part of the same corporate entity that I worked for. With David’s work, I lived with his images for a long time before I was able to write anything in response to them. The poems for this project at times incorporate fragments of David’s language into their bodies. Mostly, I saw in David’s work theme and subject matter which have also concerned me – a preoccupation with childhood, food and its relationship to culture, education, corporate life and the relationship between these concepts and our creative development. As part of his practice, David also appropriates liberally from many sources and I had been interested in loosening up my process and letting different types of language and personas enter my poems.

NET COOKIE incorporates string, an old bed sheet and various pieces of trash – recycled junk mail and other objects. An image of a ravenous COOKIE MONSTER seems like the perfect metaphor for a virus in a closed system corrupting everything within sight. Here is the poem I wrote in response to David’s painting. In looking at David’s paintings, I felt that process was an important part of his work. Sometimes, past layers of old images and ideas come thru the surfaces as David reworks his paintings. One day David showed me a painting of hamburgers on a blue and yellow background which I went totally crazy about. It was a damn fine painting. The next time I saw the hamburger painting, the burgers had completely disappeared, much to my shock and dismay. He had completely overworked the painting, gotten frustrated and scrapped the whole thing, covering the whole thing in a wash of red. (Perhaps an appropriate alternative title for NET COOKIE might be “Where’s the Beef?”)In writing NET COOKIE, I thought a lot about the revision process, for both painter and poet, and the frustrations of overworking and losing a piece, when you can no longer see what is in front of you and cannot reconstruct what came before. In each our own way, we both filtered this process thru the tech jargon that was a part of our everyday lives in the corporate world.

OPTOMETRIST was the first piece that David painted for this series – it was for him a break-through painting. Strangely enough, it was also the first of David’s images that I ended up writing about, without knowing of its importance in his process. In this painting, there are collaged elements – the logo for Copy Cop appears in triple vision, alongside an enlarged thumbprint, and a Xerox transfer of Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comic, (which is a stand in for the artist and a recurring figure throughout his paintings). When I first saw this painting, I felt that it was really teaching me how to see, retraining my eye. I read this painting like an eye chart of various elements. All art and all poetry, to a degree have the potential to teach us how to see the world anew. My poem OPTOMETRIST was the response to David’s painting. In this poem, I lifted the form from the familiar eye chart we encounter at the doctor’s office when having our vision tested. This poem marked the first time I began to experiment with using symbols and multiple typefaces within a single poem. No word seemed to communicate transparency as well as literally taking the fill out of “see-through” and making the language visually transparent.

Another of David’s works which was a “breakthrough” poem for me was his painting STA-TYT which I felt was a very aesthetically unpleasing painting but had something to say which I needed to figure out. For several months, my mind had nothing to grab on to in looking at this work, Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t the mind, but the eye at work in this painting. This is the poem I wrote in response. I played with moving the break in the title (STA-TYT to STAT-YT) to create a word/sound play that would allow me to catalog the elements of the painting “stat” and explore the definition of the indirect object (“it”). I found that ultimately, the painting and the poem are both unique physical objects, neither with a direct equal, each resisting simple paraphrase.

38,995 MILK CAPS FOR A COMPUTER was an image that interested me for its reference back to childhood, education and nutrition. As an Asian American, I did not find out until much later in my life that I am lactose intolerant, something which was overlooked in my socialization experience of food as a child. I found the idea of drinking all those jugs of milk to win a free computer as disgusting back then as I do now. Working in the healthcare industry, you learn some interesting things about health and nutrition and one piece of information that I retained long enough to slip into my poem HOODED (like the milk company) PROMOTIONS was that the food triangle was not developed by healthcare workers at all but was created by the agricultural industry to market goods. I also lifted some language for this poem from milk industry ads – the media and television had a huge impact on both how David and I grew up, despite us being very different individuals, this was one thing that we discovered we had in common in the course of our conversations together.

This last piece that I will talk about is called HEADS UP 7 UP. Heads up 7 up is a childhood game played in classrooms, typically in elementary school. The game, like dodgeball, deals with the idea of being picked or singled out. But here, those who are picked are at least somewhat lucky; if those picked can guess who picked them, they reverse the power structure and quite literally open their eyes. Those who are not picked continue to have their eyes closed and are in a sense excluded from the game and must wait until their chance to switch roles arises. The game can be viewed as both an exercise in learning how to follow rules and to accept fairly static roles.

A lot of the ideas that David and I are dealing in our project with have to do with subverting rules and authority, re-examining the notion of learning, and redefining the way that we see and communicate.

It’s been important to me to reflect back on my own childhood and education, and to realize that my interest in the relationship between visual arts and language developed at a very early age, long before any formal schooling or interest in poetry developed. As the child of immigrant parents, I was challenged to find new ways to communicate across languages to connect to my parents. My own mother is a visual artist working in abstraction and the visual arts have always had some presence in my life. While I do have vague memories of reading Dr. Seuss together, the more poignant memories I have of my childhood relate to moments spent in Museums with my mother and father, looking at works of art together, listening deeply to what each had to say and learning things in a much more experiential way than in school.

In wrapping up, I think it is important to say that I’ve approached writing for the sports project and NUTRITIONAL FEED in the way that I approached writing poems for EQUIVALENCE. All of the poems for both the sports project and NUTRITIONAL FEED were written with very little actual dialogue between myself and my collaborators, although there has definitely been an ongoing exchange of ideas. This is interesting to me, because as living artists, both Ferenc and David are resources who are obviously available to me and who can take an active role in my creative process. With EQUIVALENCE, the artists who informed my poems were largely unavailable, often times dead. Ferenc and David did not give me clues to understanding their work or suggest directions that I might take in writing my texts. At times I asked questions to clarify my understanding of areas like hockey or bodybuilding , but ultimately, the dialogue that occurs is one that truly occurs between the photographs or paintings and the poems themselves, image and the word. In this way, while both the images and the poems stand independently of one another and are “successful”, in that they work in their own ways, what is more interesting to me is the way in which these works talk to one another within a context.

Often in the arts, we talk about lineage and influence – I am more interested in the notion of “CONSOCIATION” and conversation- I feel that I am in a dialogue with the works of art themselves, and at times, with their creators, but that these are 2 very different conversations.