Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

Last week I hung my very first solo gallery show up at UNT on the Square in Denton, Texas.

All the pieces for the show were done in the five months after my son Owen was born—I made probably 60 or 70 poems, threw out at least half, and kept 30.

Most of the time I post poems to the blog or Instagram right after I make them. This is how I’ve always worked, and the whole reason the project exists—if it weren’t for online feedback and response, I would’ve stopped making these things a long time ago.

But for this show, I thought I’d experiment and work the way I imagine most artists working, toiling in the solitude and secrecy of my office, keeping the work to myself, editing at the very end, and doing the “big reveal” of the work at the show. (My wife, who reads all my stuff before anybody else, didn’t see most of the poems until a week or two before the show.) I was hoping maybe this way of working would teach me something.

What it taught me is that I hate working this way! I completely take for granted what working in the open online does for me — the feedback, the sense of connection, the sense that I’m moving towards something, etc.

Since NewspaperBlackout.com has been such a big part of the project, it was important to me that in addition to my own work this show have a section where people can make their own poems. The gallery has these cool moveable walls that we could play with, so we made the middle and focus point of the show this space with tables piled with newspaper, Sharpies, and binder clips that visitors can use to hang their own poems. Much to my delight, visitors who attended the opening were already taking advantage—it’ll be great to see how those walls fill up over the next couple of weeks.

I also wanted the space to feel really inviting, so we made a sign encouraging people to take photos of their favorite pieces and post them online with the #NewspaperBlackout hashtag:

The third and final section section of the show was a sort of last-minute idea we had — originally, I was going to project a slideshow of images from NewspaperBlackout.com, but I decided instead to project timelapse videos of me working on the show. (Again, the idea was to be inviting, to let visitors in on the process—I wanted the show to make you want to try out the method on your own.)

Here’s a timelapse video of us hanging the show:

Here’s a short video walkthrough of the opening:

And some more photos (see more on Flickr):

This was way, way more fun than I even though it would be, and I’m already thinking about what I’d do if I get the chance to do another show. Thanks so very much to everyone who came to the opening, and many, many thanks to Nicole Newland, Herbert Holl, and Meredith Buie for making it all happen. The show runs until May 6th if you’re up that way.

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Makers

Sunday, November 25th, 2012

A while back, the folks at Wired asked me to make some blackouts from their recent design issue. I thought I’d play around with the whole “maker” movement, and went hunting in the magazine for all the instances of “make” and “maker” in the text.

The blackout process is tricky — often, the more I try to intentionally “do” something with it, the less spectacular the results. Like most poetry and art, the blackouts aren’t really editorials, either — so much of what they say is what the reader brings to them, or what title or captions they’re given, or what context they’re put in.

In the end, nothing really came of these two pieces, so I’m posting them here.