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SHIFTER10 : TRANSPARENT WHITE
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Participants:
Eric Anglès
Kathleen Miller + Clifford Borress
Joseph Bradshaw
Mark Cooley
Melissa Dubbin + Aaron S. Davidson
Eric Gottesman
Branden Koch
Reuben Lorch-Miller
Matthew McAlpin
Kiki Petrosino
André Spears
Christopher Stackhouse
David Samuel Stern
Edwin Torres
Genya Turovskaya
Avinash Veeraraghavan
Ruben Verdu
Editor:
Sreshta Rit Premnath
Pieter DeHeijde
Transparent White
“Milk is not opaque because it is white, – as if white were something opaque. If ‘white’ is a concept which only refers to a visual surface, why isn’t there a colour concept related to ‘white’ that refers to transparent things?” -Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Colour”
Things that can be imagined but not seen. Things that can be seen but not named. Things that can be imagined but not articulated, nor seen. Things that can be said but not seen or imagined. I think “Transparent White” belongs to the last of these categories.
Of course, I use words loosely here.
But imagine, for instance, contemplating a picture of a Martian landscape. We imagine a place, like a red desert. We look toward its hazy horizon as if we could actually see it. In a way, we imagine the object – the target of our gaze – knowing that we do not (cannot) actually stand on Mars. In fact the only way we can access the object is by seeing it in terms that are imaginable. We look from the wrong context, we are displaced, yet we transpose our horizon onto the picture’s and we see a desert. Desolate but nameable.
Can a word mean without representing something? Or can a word be understood if we do not know or have not seen what it represents?
Shifter’s 9th issue Ruin|Monument focussed on the way in which the empty ruin signifies. Like a vacuum it absorbs everything. Like a mirror it reflects back our pointing fingers. The Monument, it was proposed, is the past (memory) embodied, hurtling backwards towards the future.
If the “Ruin” is an absence, which is transformed into object by our projections, then “Transparent White” is fully formed language which does not stick to an object. In a way they are mirror images of each other. While the Monument like the ruin exists physically (it occupies space, we can walk around it, we can photograph it), “Transparent White” occupies a conceptual site of contention. One is not sure if/ what it could represent. Yet one can imagine using the phrase “Transparent White”, in a poem for instance, and meaning something.
Shifter’s 10th issue “Transparent White” will attempt to engage this untethering of utterances from straightforward representation.
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Eric Anglès is a translator, constantly negotiating between four languages: Portuguese, French, German and English. Clifford Borress works in Brooklyn and currently pursues a master’s in photography at Bard College. Joseph Bradshaw is the author of The Way Birds Become (Weather Press, 2007). His poems and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Cannibal, Cranky, Cultural Society, Denver Quarterly, MiPOesias, the tiny, and Zafusy. He currently lives in Iowa City, IA. Mark Cooley is a new genre artist interested in exploring politics/economics, identity and visual rhetoric in American popular (and not so popular) culture. Mark’s work has been shown internationally in online and offline venues such as Exit Art, Postmasters Gallery, Furtherfield.org and Rhizome.org. Documentation of Mark’s work can be seen at his website at flawedart.net. Mark is an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University. Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson have worked collaboratively since 1998. Their projects are multi-disciplinary in nature and include practices in video, sculpture, sound, performance, and works on paper. Dubbin & Davidson have exhibited internationally at Sadler’s Wells, London; 2004 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; E-Flux Video Rental; Espace Paul Ricard, Paris; and the New York/Québec Interlacé Festival. They have exhibited in the United States at museums, galleries, and art centers including SculptureCenter, New York; Gigantic Art Space, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Center for Contemporary Art Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Museum of Art & Design, New York; New Sound New York Festival. Eric Gottesman is a collaborative artist working with photography and video. For the last seven years, he has been working on a project with Sudden Flowers Productions, a children’s art collective in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that he helped found. Together, they have produced imagery that describes how the children’s lives have been affected by poverty and disease. They have shown the work locally in English and Amharic and http://www.ericgottesman.net/
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Branden Koch Lives/works – Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from Bard College. His recent solo exhibitions include: Rowland Contemporary April 2007, Chicago IL; High Energy Constructs, LA, CA November 2006. He organizes the series "One Night Stand" They are temporary exhibitions in his Brooklyn apartment. Reuben Lorch-Miller grew up in Washington State. He received an MFA in New Genres from San Francisco State University in 2001. He has been an artist-in-residence at The Headlands Center for The Arts (Sausalito, CA) and Medicine Factory (Memphis, TN). His work has been exhibited widely including venues in San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Lisbon. Using a variety of media, he integrates sculpture, installation, video, sound, painting, text and photography. The work often explores themes of power, fear, ambivalence and anti-heroics, typically placed within the context of cultural motifs, personal symbology and the landscape. He currently lives in New York City where he has only one cat and tries to grow vegetables on the roof. http://www.lorch-miller.com Matt McAlpin is a doctoral student in the English department at SUNY Stony Brook, more interested in freshman comp than anything else. His whole life, the big Other has been telling him to be the Master and a philosopher, he has recently come to the realization that he’s a sophist and a pervert. Kathleen Miller is a poet who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has kindly been featured in publications such as Shampoo Magazine and Bay Poetics Anthology, as well as "The Weather is Happening All Around Us," a chapbook from Delirium Press. Kiki Petrosino is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Best New Poets 2006, Unpleasant Event Schedule, POOL, Forklift Ohio, and elsewhere. André Spears is the author of Fragments from Mu (A Sequel) (First Intensity, 2007); his other works include Xo: A Tale for the New Atlantis (1983) and Letters from Mu (Part I), both of which are posted online at www.pangaeapress.com. Christopher Stackhouse is the author of a collection of poems, Slip (Corollary Press, 2005) and co-author with poet/novelist/professor John Keene on the collaborative book Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006) which features Keene’s text and Stackhouse’s drawings. He is a contributing editor for Fence Magazine, a Cave Canem Writer Fellow, a 2005 Fellow in Poetry New York Foundation For The Arts, and a Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, M.F.A. Writing candidate. David Samuel Stern uses photography to examine the relationship between vision and representation. He is originally from suburban Chicago and received an MFA in digital imaging & photography from Washington University in St. Louis. His work has been featured by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City. http://davidsamuelstern.com |
Edwin Torres of sightsound bits, of lingua stretched, across beaches and billow, by brix and books, of folio beards, of nubile bards, the poPedology of ambient language, the functions of external circumstance, of spooked devil, dusting day, of unions, the shock, the worker, the roof, holy kid, kills rock star, foundation, for contemporary, among others, performance, and art, and nyfa, in restless residence, lmcc, co-editor of dvd, stevens thundrous zeitgimp, radio rattattat rip, ps1, dot org, live theater, nude yip, double double you, dot, dit, lingoblip. Genya Turovskaya was born in Kiev, Ukraine and grew up in New York City. She is the author of Calendar (Ugly Duckling Presse 2002). And The Tides (Octopus Books 2007). Her poetry and translations from Russian have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, 6×6, The Germ, Aufgabe, A Public Space, Octopus, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is the Associate Editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse, and teaches writing and literary translation at Pratt Institute and NYU. Avinash Veeraraghavan Lives and works in Bangalore, India. He worked as a freelance graphic designer for several years before starting to make art work. His first project was a picture book titled ‘I Love My India. Stories for a city.’ His works have also been shown at Sakshi Gallery, Bangalore, GallerySKE, Bangalore, and Project88, Mumbai amongst few others. Ruben Verdu has devoted himself to fictionalize and ridicule some of the most boring aspects of our contemporary living experience. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela. After receiving his MFA from CalArts, he moved to New York to attend the Whitney Museum ISP. He now lives an works in Barcelona, Spain, where he has just finished exhibiting at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica. He will be part of the upcoming LOOP’07 festival. Sreshta Rit Premnath lives and works in NYC. He received his MFA from Bard College and his BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art. His work has been shown in various galleries including Rotunda Gallery Brooklyn, Bose Pacia, NY; Islip Art Museum, LI; Gallery SKE, and Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, India; Spaces Gallery, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Pieter DeHeijde lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. He is known for his discreet text and image based interventions into Wikipedia and other public domain information sources. He is engaged in trying to understand the ways in which the notion of truth is performed, articulated and transformed in the public sphere. He is currently working on a book "The Rebirth of Myth in Contemporary Politics," to be published by Idelwilde Press in 2008. |
