My Poetry Scores Entry for 2009

Alright, so the deal with this show is that it's based around a specific poem and what you do is you pick a line or a phrase and you make a piece of art about it. That's pretty much it.

Actually, what happens is Chris King (Confluence City) or Steve Lindsley (Art Patrol) calls or writes you and asks you to contribute a piece of art to this annual invitational and then you have like 3 or 4 months to choose a title from the poem they've selected and then come up with some sort of a visual response to the text or, I don't know, pretty much anything you wanna do... as long as it hangs on the wall. This is a thing called Poetry Scores.

It's called that 'cause, in addition to all this random, arbitrary art-makin', there's an actual musical score composed, for or to the poem, by Mr. King and his esteemed associates-who-play-musical-instruments like Bobby Goetz and Three Fried Men or who knows who all. (I'm not really involved with that end of things - though Kingy says it's gonna sound kinda like XTC's English Settlement, which is one of my all-time favorite records, Yay!) And then what happens is they make a CD of that, of course, and release it on the night of the exhibition and, you know, you put on a tie and go get drunk at a art show (again).

I probably won't wear a tie, actually.

Anyways, you can read the poem here if you want to, it's called The Sydney Highrise Variations and is written by Les Murray, who is a guy I never heard of before.

And this is my inclusion:

It's a mixed-media collage entitled, "The City's Conversation".

Here is a surface detail.

It's composed upon a very old piece of paper I pulled off the back of a frame I was fixing for someone likewise old about ten years ago... and then some other bits of paper I found in this big envelope full of bits of paper I have but haven't looked at in a long time... the black is from this old, torn-up portfolio case I used to carry my prints in when I went to Santa Monica College in '97, but that finally fell apart... the white is just some thick, Arches watercolor paper I'm glad I saved... the red is from a scrap of red paper, doy... and the brown on top of that is just something I found in, um, in the scrapbooking section of Michael's. Scrapbooking is, like, some kind of a really big deal now, isn't it? Oh, and the pills are Lamotrigine in the convenient twenty-five milligram size. They're cute, aren't they? Don't ask me what they do, though, 'cause I don't really know.

The stuff written in pencil underneath my little pill-and-paper petit fours is just the names of some of the neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia. Something like that. Just various words I found on a map of Sydney I Googled up... ideally in their proper position with relation one another, though not painstakingly so... to say the least.

All of that is then floated on acid-free matboard, then matted, with a lift, in pure, white, 8-ply rag board, then protected by ultraviolet-blocking conservation glass, and then framed in a simple, matte black Williamson profile, about an inch-and-a-quarter wide.

The finished piece is about twenty-one by twenty-nine inches in size and will be available for purchase (in silent auction) at the Poetry Scores Art Invitational Exhibition At The Luminary Center for the Arts (4900 Reber Pl. at Kingshighway across from Tower Grove Park) from Six until Ten p.m. on Friday, November the Thirteenth (after-party following at The Royale, down the street.)