ii ss

pratt institute – school of architecture – rome program
invites you to view

ii ss
collaborative works : mixed media drawings and text by

hermine ford and kathleen fraser

inaugurazione: 3 aprile 2007 ore 17:30
piazza s. apollonia 3, trastevere roma

viewing hours will continue:
april 4 and 5, 17:30 to 20:30

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HERMINE FORD

Hermine Ford lives and paints in NYC and in Nova Scotia, and travels annually to Rome. She teaches painting in the graduate program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Ford’s work has been featured in five solo shows in NYC, as well as in numerous group shows, with work appearing in a number of distinguished public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Corcoran Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. Exhibitions in 2007 have begun with Ford’s mixed media drawings in tandem with sculptor, John Newman, at Plattsburgh State Art Museum (N.Y.) and an expanded version of the collaborative project appearing here — a series of image/word pieces developed over the last year with the poet, Kathleen Fraser, from artifacts of their shared attraction to Italian art and history.

Artist’s Statement:

This work began in Rome and that city remains, in large part, the touchstone for the work I’m doing for ii ss. A very old, very great city rising up on top of its own debris, over and over again, brings to mind the idea that art and architecture are made from raw materials, recycled over the millennia. One’s eye and hand move over those materials while at the beach, in the mountains, in the studio, visiting an Italian city, and the artist remembers how they once were and rearranges them: water, mud, stones, the pigments and tiles. The work for ii ss grew so naturally, often responding to Kathleen’s words with my stored images, just as her words unexpectedly evolved from connections to my drawings — a process feeling exactly like a conversation between old friends.

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KATHLEEN FRASER

Kathleen Fraser lives in San Francisco, teaching in the graduate writing program at the California College of the Arts. Since 1987, she has lived in Rome for five months each spring — writing, translating and absorbing the language and visual history of Italy & the Etruscans. She is winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, as well as the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize (NYC).

In October, Fraser presented projections of her recent collaged texts & collaborative work with three graphic artists at the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival at Cambridge University/ UK. Recent books include DISCRETE CATEGORIES FORCED INTO COUPLING (2004, Apogee Press), hi dde violeth i dde violet (2004, Nomados Press), and her collected essays, Translating the Unspeakable, Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (2000, University of Alabama Press / Contemporary Poetics Series). She has previously collaborated on artist books with painters Sam Francis and Mary Ann Hayden. Chax Press has just published W I T N E S S, a letter-press limited edition, in collaboration with print-maker Nancy Tokar Miller.

From 1983 to 1992, Fraser published & edited HOW(ever), a journal for poets and scholars interested in modernist/ innovative directions in writing by 20th century women — now on the web as How2: www.how2journal.com.

Working Note:

The movement between coherence and incoherence has long compelled me, pulling my attention to the physicality of single or paired words, even how the characters of b, i or t — in a particular typeface — deliver discrete visual phenomena of intent. I’ve noticed how an allowance for — & acknowledgement of — typo and error, in tension with known grammar, can be revelatory. The desire to reposition fragments and watch them adhere to newly forming word events comes from the deliberate pleasure of the unexpected, found in hybrid (or log-jam) forms untangled and realigned during the working process. When Hermine Ford and I decided to embark upon a collaborative project, I‘d been looking at her work for years, following its increasingly vivid preoccupation with visual maps and overlaps, her alterior views of the earth’s evolving materials and reformations. I wanted to respond to these with the direct physicality of pieces & overlaps of language in space, each bearing its own face.

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Immagine tratta da Your New Face.