Wilson, Stein, The Third Thing, + Selcer

“we dont need more concepts but presences”
-R.W.

+ Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man and Poems of the Black Object and most recently, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other and Lucy 72 . He is a member of the Black Took collective and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz. In his performance work and performative video, dance, drag, music and masks interpolate the formal tension of the poem. Like Hito Steryl’s “poor images” his work is stitched from cultural artifacts that are passed around and over-mediated. If modernist literature carved the space of interior subjectivity, this is an interior script of improvisatory cultural memory, which has to do with recording and recalling the sensory world through the singular conduit of one body. From inside multiple contingencies, this body asserts a sinuous autonomy.

+ Suzanne Stein is a poet, writer, and performer. Her work is often site- and context-specific, collaborative, anxious, and interactive, joining examinations of visual and performance arts with lyric and somatic exploration. Many of her projects are first drafted live and in front of an audience, as speech or as text. At risk, in real time. Recent publications and performance documents include The Kim Game (Area Sneaks), TOUT VA BIEN (Displaced Press), and Passenger Ship (Ypolita). Poems, talk performances, and prose have appeared in War and Peace, On: Contemporary Practice, Counterpath; and at New Langton Arts, the Poetry Project, the Berkeley Art Museum, and elsewhere; audio performances are archived at PennSound. Other texts in the live, performative, and conceptual vein include Three-Way (2nd Floor Projects, 2009), HOLE IN SPACE (Omg, 2009), and Orphée (Minor/American, 2007). With Steve Benson, she is the author of DO YOUR OWN DAMN LAUNDRY, a book documenting the 36 live improvisational dialogues they performed together between 2011 and 2012.

+ The Third Thing is a performative poetics collaboration between Bay Area poets Ivy Johnson and Kate Robinson. They deploy still and moving images, live performance, and poetry to create multimedia collages in the service of an ecstatic feminist agenda. “If I watch violence passionately with care, will that free me from violence? If it is freedom you seek, don’t watch the violence, but participate in it. I want to put my body there again. I want to re-live my trauma and again. If aesthetecized, it becomes an image, a body to be consumed. Eat your heart out. I want nothing left of it. And yet, I hold onto my wounds with irascible grief. And yet, I dream that with enough momentum, we can ride that great wind of cruelty into the real, which is to say, pure presence. Touch me and touch me hard; katharos, pure. What does it feel like now, to both live in a body and be a body that was once occupied by violence in violation of that body’s will? Now, if I hold up the infrared light to my subtle-bodied, naked flesh in the dark room, searching for DNA evidence, where will that glitter of blood taken persist?”

+ Anne Lesley Selcer is an art writer and a poet in the expanded field. Her collection from A Book of Poems on Beauty was chosen for the Gazing Grain publication award in 2014. She is also the author of Banlieusard commissioned by Artspeak (Vancouver), as well as two other chapbooks. Work has just gone up at GaussPDF. Poetry and critical writing is forthcoming in The Chicago Review, Elderly, Rabble (Insert Blanc), and the Capilano Review / have most recently appeared in Fence, Open House, Armed Cell and Art Practical. Writing has been included in seven anthologies, and appears in many catalogs or monographs. She was a member of the Nonsite Collective in San Francisco, and curated the Chroma Reading Series in Vancouver. An artist-in-residence at Krowswork gallery, and a fellow at Mildred’s Lane, she is Southern Exposure’s current art writing fellow. Current creative and critical work is on appearance, disappearance, biopolitics, and social death.