(September 24 - November 6, 2005)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Poem as Image:Poetry in Contemporary Visual Art

Words and Images by 11 Contemporary Artists and Poets in all media from outdoor sculpture to intimate drawing.

The Studio: An Alternative Space for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce a juried group exhibition entitled " Poem as Image " which opens September 24 and runs through November 6 . A Call for Entries published in print and on the internet brought submissions from 75 artists from 4 continents. The curator, Cathrin Hoskinson , has selected 11 contemporary artists and poets whose original and vibrant work concerns the mixture of word and image. Artists from across the country (Seattle, Chicago, Florida, the New York area, as well as Canada and France) are exhibiting work in all media from outdoor sculpture to intimate drawing.

Ms. Hoskinson states, "Consumer culture surrounds us with aggressive word and image information, meant to convince on rational as well as subconscious levels. By contrast, the work in this show focuses on the quieter, individual voice, which questions the structure of language or the possibility of communication, and which speaks of love, memory and the fragility of humanity. A poem can slow down and rearrange language, crystallizing experience through the selective use of words as signs and symbols. The subject of this show is the metaphorical common area between what is felt, what is seen, its image, what is spoken, its sign. The words themselves become the image and what attempts to be spoken becomes objectified - layered, fragmented, scratched out, isolated, scattered."

The Artists of "Poem as Image" exhibition:

Doug DePice combines many systems of description in his intense drawings. The markings of words, symbols of mathematics, and artistic forms combine with maps and weather charts in a layered complexity. Joseph Mills meticulously recreates in paint bits of paper and edited manuscript to preserve the processes of thought in the creation of a written work, to trace its history while emphasizing the fragility of the gestures of the text on the paper. Stephen Spretnjak uses a wall installation as a kind of collage, in which the word/ poem elements are isolated and preserved in plastic sheets. The effect, which travels up the wall in a grid, is of an on-going poetic investigation. Armelle Chitrit's poems follow every line of the form of her drawings of vegetables in a sensuous dialogue referring to tasting and speaking; Joan Stuart Ross layers and cuts into her surfaces of encaustic, breaking up a dense narrative structure by strokes and scratches. Words become gesture in the sensuous paintings of Soheila Esfahani, who writes out the love poems of Rumi in Arabic, and references to Persian miniatures fill the evocative prints of Anna Bhushan, whose image-poems breathe out the verses of Omar Khyam. Words which are basically text become three-dimensional in the work of Sheila Hale who uses books as sculptural forms, urgently invaded by image and evocative gesture,and in Debbie Sutton's latex shadows which lounge on a bench holding near the heart the text of a forgotten conversation. Words abandon conventional structure and become an environment to experience through the body in the exuberant installation by Nick Carbo'. His hanging balls marked with color-coded words are read while walking through and around the space. Ali Naschke-Messing also addresses the spatial relationship of language in a dispersal of words written on shells. They form a scattered utterance which sifts through the fingers.

This exhibit not only challenges conventional viewing of art and reading of poetry, it resonates deep within the psyche though its beauty and depth of spirit.

Poetry Reading by  Marc Straus on October 29th:

Straus has received many poetry awards including the National Poetry Competition, and the Robert Penn Warren Award in Humanities from Yale University Medical School. He is also the Founder of The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.

The poetry reading will be from Not God. Not God is a poem play with 2 characters, a hospitalized woman and her physician. It was the basis of a museum show in 2004 at Lehigh University Art Galleries. Not God was also produced off Broadway in 2004 and 2005. The Poetry reading is on October 29th at 2:00pm. A book signing will follow the poetry reading. Suggested donation:$5.00, Reservations are required. Limited seating is available.

The Studio is open Saturday and Sunday 1 to 5pm during exhibitions and by appointment Tuesday through Friday. For further information, please contact Katie Stratis at (914) 273-1452 or visit The Studio's web site at www.thestudiony-alternative.org.

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Copyright: The Studio 2005