Saturday, February 2, 2019

Art Show: Assemblage of Existentialism

I'm excited to share a bit about a collaborative art exhibition that my friend and colleague, Jonathan Brownlee, and I are showcasing during the month of February at the Art and Performance Center of West Toledo. Our exhibition is titled Assemblage of Existentialism and it showcases the artwork from my dissertation project and a four-part series called Anatomy of the Writer. Jon is showcasing several pieces from a series and other stand-alone works. I love the way the exhibition came together, and I think Jon's work does a nice job of complementing mine and vice versa.

You can visit the exhibition during the month of February whenever the Art and Performance Center is open (see the event calendar at the end of this post), and we will be hosting a reception later in the month (TBD). You can find more information below about my part of the exhibition, and there are some preview photos below of our showcase:

The Queer Art of Writing
This series of collages was created for my doctoral dissertation, which is titled The Queer Art of Writing: (Re)Imagining Scholarship and Pedagogy Through Transgenre Composing. Since I am defending my dissertation this month and am graduating in May 2019, it seemed like the perfect time to showcase the artwork I’ve been working on for the past two years while writing my dissertation.

The idea for my dissertation developed as I was attempting to reconcile my identities as both a creative writer and a writing studies scholar. My driving questions have been: Can creative writing be scholarly, and can scholarly writing be creative? Is there a place for art in writing? My dissertation works to answer these questions and advocate for the use of art in writing studies scholarship and pedagogy by examining “transgenre” compositions (or compositions that combine elements of both art and writing). Because of the focus of my dissertation, I decided to make the project a tangible representation of what the intersections of art and writing can look like. As a result, my dissertation is a combination of art and text. The collages in the showcase are interspersed throughout the first four chapters of the project; I took a different approach with my fifth and final chapter, which was created using photographs and footnotes.

Anatomy of the Writer
Anatomy of the Writer was created to accompany a medical rhetorics article I’ve been working on for an academic journal. Staying true to the focus of my dissertation, the artwork works with the text in the article to create an altogether new reading/viewing experience for audiences. The text of the article intersects with this artwork, which outlines my experiences with traumatic injury, surgery, and recovery, to emphasize the rhetorical nature of bodies and the importance of acknowledging our embodied subjectivities in writing.

Enjoy the preview! The photos show a mix of me and Jon's work.