You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you)
Roland Barthes, "Absence" A Lover's Discourse (Fragments)
claps and claps
her one hand
Olga Broumas, "Innocence" Beginning with O
Initiated at the behest of curator Jolee Smith for a show centered on work by artists who sometimes work in collaborative pairs, a version of Caught Looking was presented as a video installation in the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax during July 2018. The entire project, a further development in their ongoing work on the notion of "dimensional poetry," or poetry that develops using spatial and visual propositions, as well as words, explores some of the possible terms of looking now, after modernism, after Albers, when everything in the world passes through the windows on our screens. As they remark in their artists' statement: "Caught Looking. We’ve all done it: before Facebook, before Instagram, there were windows. Windows and thresholds. We peered into our neighbour’s houses, leaned across fences, stood on porches and in doorways and looked...."
Acutely aware, as queer artists, of the allure and historical risks of searching for and finding fragmentary signs of other queer and marginalized people, Cope and Josey write: "To be caught looking is sometimes framed as a crime, and yes, it almost always depends upon who you are [presumed to be].....Looking then, is a certain act of privilege, a seizure of privilege, a play with privilege. Do you open the curtains or not? (Do you have curtains or a room in which to open them?) To whom? How much? What then happens after that?...."
Caught Looking, like lyric, is a play with the controlled reveal. We steal our glances from what we are given (wittingly and unwittingly) to see....We frame (and are framed by) our views and our looks,;we travel inward as we look outward, and get lost in the endless scrolls of our screens. What is inward? What is outward? Where is our looking (and our exposure) happening now? "Do you catch yourself looking here? At what? For what are you looking as you glance or peer through the swish and flicker of curtain and screen?" (For more information about this project, and the full version of the artist statement, see http://www.jolee-smith.com/caught-looking/-looking-after-albers.)
In Screen Blinds, each image (stanza) has been lifted from the lookingafteralbers Instagram feed, reordered, edited and recontextualized. Traces of the context remain, although crossed out in some entries: signs that every view is an extract, a fragment, a space where one sees, is seen, and also hides; in short, each screen view is also a blind.
Karin
Cope is a poet, sailor, photographer,
scholar, rural activist, blogger and an Associate Professor at NSCAD University
who often works collaboratively. Her publications include Passionate
Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein, a poetry collection
entitled What We're Doing to Stay Afloat, and, since 2009, a
photo/poetry blog entitled Visible Poetry: Aesthetic Acts in Progress.
With her partner, Marike Finlay-de Monchy, Cope runs a sailing blog entitled West By East; they have also co-authored an illustrated material history
of the Lunenburg Foundry (Casting a Legend), as well as numerous policy
documents and travel articles. For more of Cope's work, see https://visiblepoetry.wordpress.com/
Ryan Josey (b. 1993 Dartmouth, Nova Scotia) is an emerging Canadian
artist and writer. He studied Fine Art (BFA 2015) and Art History (BA 2015) at
NSCAD University, and in studio with Canadian artist, Brendan Fernandes in New
York City. He currently makes images, installations and text-based work through
drawing, painting, photo, video, performance and collaboration. See http://www.ryanjosey.ca/ for samples of Ryan's work.
Karin Cope and Ryan Josey
have been collaborating for several years on a notion they call
"dimensional poetry," or a poetry of vision, object, action and
installation. Their manifesto, with Anna Heywood Jones, "Given Time: Notes on Dimensional Poetry," was published in C Magazine in 2016.
