Parlour Portraits: Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, and Vanessa Place

Please join us for the launch of our chapbook Parlour Portraits, published on the occasion of our collaboration with sculptors Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel, who have created objects from our poems.

Details about the art show:
Parlour Portraits represents one-part of Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel’s overarching Petits Genre sculptural project and features commissioned poetic portraits from three contemporary poets: Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, and Vanessa Place. Our collaborative exploration of the relationship between sculpture, text and printmaking fashioned, perhaps not anything as grand as a Salon des Refusés, but more like a petit salon; a parlance of five interdisciplinary artists interested in the intersections and disseminations of language as material. Parlour Portraits is a record of the installation of three wooden printing devices and the prints made by these devices of the three commissioned poems. Each wooden device is cylindrical, with handles for rolling, and its surface is cut for printing a single looping poem with no formal beginning or end. Prints of each poem, taken directly from the printing device, complete the installation. Each poem responds freely to the Steinbeck quote below, that also serves other purposes in the overarching exhibition.

Petits Genre stages a return to Donovan and Siegel’s earlier text-based work, to seek out links between different forms of artistic representation – painting, sculpture and the printed word. Each piece will be a reinterpretation of the petits genres of painting. The show builds on their “History Machines” collection: contemporary artifacts that are both forward-looking and historically inspired, and that are primarily concerned with how ideas resurface again and again on the cultural landscape. Please visit www.historymachines.com for more.