VIDEO
Robert Ladislas Derr
“To Helen” a 4-chennel video piece will be screened for Doves and Crocodiles. To Helen was a psychogeographical walk (wearing four video cameras) through Providence, RI at midnight. Based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem To Helen, for one hour beginning at the Athenaeum where Poe was known to write, I traced the footsteps that Poe might have taken while creating this poem written to his beloved Helen Whitman, resident of Providence. Dressed in white, reminiscent of Poe’s remembrance of Helen "clad in white upon a violet bank", I moved through the dark night on historic Benefit Street toward the First Baptist Meeting House, then down Meeting Street to Waterplace Park. Continuing on the Riverwalk, I headed back to Benefit Street. Upon the John Brown and Nightingale Brown houses, I looked for the roses that Poe says "grew in an enchanted garden". From there, I continued on Benefit Street until the Point Street Bridge, where I met in Poe’s words "the mossy banks and the meandering paths".
Robert Ladislas Derr uses performance, video, photography, and installation as he puts himself literally in the center of a barrage of questions about life and making art. He has exhibited and performed worldwide at such venues as the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany), LIVE Performance Art Biennale (Vancouver, BC, Canada), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH), Athens Video Art Festival (Athens, Greece), Photographic Resource Center (Boston, MA), American Academy in Rome (Rome, Italy), Independent Museum of Contemporary Art (Limassol, Cyprus), Irish Film Institute (Dublin, Ireland), Art Interactive (Cambridge, MA), DiVA Festival (New York, NY), and Jack the Pelican Presents (Brooklyn, NY).
http://home1.arts.ohio-state.edu/~derr34/tohelen.html
LIT
Jac Jemc
In "The Dreaded Miscellany," Jac Jemc will try her hand at the Gothic - the genre for which Poe is perhaps most famous. A miscellany is gifted the narrator by an intellectually curious uncle who has met an untimely end. On a daily walk, the life of a stumbled-upon fruit bat slips away without explanation. The book calls to the narrator, drawing him away from his own livelihood, and asking him to believe the content of its pages despite his most common sense.
Jac Jemc lives in Chicago where she makes monsters and writes fiction and poetry. Her first novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in 2012 and a chapbook of stories, This Stranger She’d Invited In, is due out from Greying Ghost Press in 2010. Jac’s writing has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, finished 2nd place in the Marginalia College Contest and placed as a finalist for the Rose Metal Press Chapbook Contest and Sentence Firewheel Chapbook Contest. Her story “Women in Wells” was featured in the 2010 Best of the Web. Jac received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has completed residencies at Ragdale and the Vermont Studio Center. She is poetry editor at decomP and member of the editorial team at Tarpaulin Sky. She was the guest-editor of issue 7 of Little White Poetry Journal and worked as a reader at Our Stories and The Means.
http://jacjemc.wordpress.com/
SOUND
Edgar Allen Poe liked to hide the truth from his readers and force them to play detective. He published six hoaxes, stories that were first presented to readers in the guise of nonfiction. Dunn and Kramer patch into this sensibility for their Doves and Crocodiles performance.
liscentric.com:
liscentric.com is home to the work of Ryan T. Dunn. Enemy Gallery on Milwaukee Ave functions as Ryan Dunn’s studio and home. Ryan is interested in sound “because of its physical properties and its ability to exist in places spontaneously. Sound is important to me because it fundamentally exists in the case of an action. Something has to happen something has to change for sound to exist. Sound exists because of causation, the perpetuation of wave motion after two other bodies collide or some kind of motion. Whether it be a speaker or two objects colliding in mid-air and that causing a vibration. It’s also temporary”. Ryan collaborates with numerous talked about sound artists in and beyond Chicago.
Joseph Kramer
Joseph Kramer is a sound artist and musician based in Chicago, IL. He recently received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is split between performance and object making. His background as an instrument maker and musician have led him to an interest in the relationship between tools and expression. His work examines the way alphabets, language, walkie talkies, cell phones and other communication technologies contribute to the messages they spread and the sounds that they rely on to do so. Kramers’ work draws a focus to the nexus sound, language and technology as a flexible point of meaning creation and manipulation.
