Why Postscript Matters

Why has MCA Denver curated an exhibition on conceptual writing, and why now? Part of the relevance of Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art stems from our present situation in the digital age. We are flooded everyday with the digital, which, as Artforum argued several months back, "is, at base, a linguistic model. Convert any .jpg file to .txt and you will find its ingredients: a garbled recipe of numbers and letters, meaningless to the average viewer." If the digital is indeed "at base, a linguistic model," then this deluge of the digital indicates a linguistic shift. We are experiencing a linguistic shift about how we process information, and that linguistic shift also has visual consequences; everyday we access information via different technologies, and we process that information via different visual formats. .jpg files neatly summarize these visual consequences, as well as an apparatus like the Kindle might. 

Remembering Jake Adam York

In December of 2012, our community lost one of its most beloved contributors, Jake Adam York.

Eric Zboya's Poetic Star Stuff

MCA Denver invited artist Derek Beaulieu to guest blog during the duration of the exhibition Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, in which excerpts from Beaulieu's 124-painting sequence the Newspaper are featured. Beaulieu is the author of 9 books of poetry and conceptual fiction. He teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and can be found online at:  www.derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com. This is the third of four blogs for MCA Denver.

If poetry could close it eyes and dream what shape would those dreams take? Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art’s contributor Eric Zboya explores poetry of delicate multi-dimensional dreamscapes—unearthly shapes hovering between dreams and wakefulness. When we close our eyes, unanchored floating shapes skitter and crawl across the blackness like alien mitochondria in a petri dish.

Please welcome new Curatorial Assistant Sonya Falcone

Recently, our former Curatorial Assistant Tricia Robson moved on to Google. Stepping expertly into the vacant role we have Sonya Falcone, formerly of Platform 5280- Biennial of the Americas. Sonya was so kind as to accept my request for an interview, MCA Denver-style.

If you were a fruit, which fruit would you be and why?

A clementine – they love winter and they have the coolest name.

I’ve noticed your cubicle is still a little bare. Guess you are too busy to decorate! If you could have any artwork for your desk, what would it be? Size doesn’t matter, we can get you a bigger desk.

Can we set up my desk in one of the Raphael rooms at St. Peter’s?

Name one of your favorite places in Denver, besides the museum of course. 

Little Man ice cream.

What would you like to be doing forty years from now? 

Living on a lake with a big garden and a great dane (the kind with cow spots).

Please talk about someone from elementary school you still remember.

My elementary school music teacher, Dr. McCaskill, was such a cool lady that the kids in my 5^th grade class would come to school an hour early for choir practice. Our performance of The Pirates of Penzance was unforgettable.

Watch the MCA Denver Holiday Video

Happy 2013 everyone. We had a blast in 2012 and hope you did too. 

Stay tuned for the blooper reel. 

A Graphic Tour of My Desk

A GRAPHIC TOUR OF MY DESK
ALEX A STEPHENS / CREATIVE & PRODUCTION MANAGER

Welcome to a short tour of my desk, with some of my creative & personal inspirations. (L to R)

ELISA MCKNIGHT: a "Cancer Sucks" button that my mother gave me during her Chemo/Herceptin therapy. As she said, "Here, have this. Why the hell would I want it." She has been in remission for about 2.5 years. Yay!

HANK WILLIS THOMAS: an "I Like Dick" image pulled from a gallery ad for What Goes Without Saying. Thomas is a contemporary African American artist whose photographs were shown in the MCA Denver exhibition More American Photographs.

The Fabric of Jen Bervin’s Work

MCA Denver invited artist Derek Beaulieu to guest blog during the duration of the exhibition Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, in which excerpts from Beaulieu's 124-painting sequence the Newspaper are featured. Beaulieu is the author of 9 books of poetry and conceptual fiction. He teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and can be found online at:  www.derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com. This is the second of four blogs for MCA Denver.

 

In this blog, Derek Beaulieu focuses on the work of Jen Bervin, one of 102 artists whose work appears in the current MCA Denver exhibition Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Her works, The Composite Marks of  Fascicle 28 and The Composite Marks of Fascicle 40, remove the words from Emily Dickinson's published poetry and retain only the editorial marks, insertions, and amendments found in her original handwritten manuscripts.

My first exposure to Jen Bervin’s work was though her Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004) in which she erases sections of Shakespeare’s sonnets in order to create fragile poems of beautiful telegraph-like brevity. Shakespeare’s sonnet 2 (“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow”) is, for example, condensed and transformed into “a weed of small worth / asked / to be new made.” The “weed of small worth / asked / to be new made” is an ongoing concern in Bervin’s work, as she harvests poetic gestures emerging from the poetic ground of other poets’ work. Her work has a melancholic tone as she focuses on creation through absence: a writing of the holes in literature.