Samuel Jablon's The Poet Sculpture:
Reading and Performance
Thursday, January 21, 2016
7 to 9pm
Samuel Jablon, Poet Sculpture, 2013-Present. [Image Description: A photograph of several stacked wooden blocks that gradually diminish in size from bottom to top. On the wooden blocks are words such as “HOWL!,” “THERE,” and “O’Hara.”]
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation hosted Samuel Jablon's The Poet Sculpture: Reading and Performance. The Poet Sculpture was activated in a reading by seven poets including Steve Dalachinsky, Bob Holman, Samuel Jablon, Paolo Javier, Sophie Malleret, Yuko Otomo, and Barry Schwabsky. Conceived and created by artist Samuel Jablon, The Poet Sculpture is an installation and moveable platform comprised of soapboxes of various sizes. Each individual box is designed for an influential poet, and the formation and words of poets are then configured during each performance to define the sculpture. The Poet Sculpture is continually in flux as poets physically interact in real time with the structure to create and manipulate a three-dimensional visual poem while performing their own language based works. When used as a platform during poetry readings, literary artists interact with soapboxes named for Julia de Burgos, Jayne Cortez, ee cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Langston Hughes, Tuli Kupferberg, Taylor Mead, Frank O'Hara, and Pedro Pietri.
The reading was accompanied by a Culinary Intervention by Chef Turi Scalora.
Bios
Poet/collagist Steve Dalachinsky was born in Brooklyn after the last big war and has managed to survive lots of little wars. His book The Final Nite (Ugly Duckling Presse) won the PEN Oakland National Book Award. His most recent books are Fools Gold (2014 Feral Press), A Superintendent's Eyes (revised and expanded 2013/14 - Unbearable/Autonomedia) and Flying Home, a collaboration with German visual artist Sig Bang Schmidt (Paris Lit Up Press 2015). His latest cd is The Fallout of Dreams with Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach (Roguart 2014). He is a 2014 recipient of a Chevalier D' le Ordre des Artes et Lettres.
Bob Holman is a poet, professor and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club. He is host of Language Matters, a film on endangered languages now streaming on PBS.
Samuel Jablon (Binghamton, NY 1986) is an artist who moves between different methods of creating, practicing, and doing. For Jablon poetry is always in the background, his practice is rooted in the tension of words and materiality. Jablon's work has been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, BOMB Magazine, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. His projects and exhibitions have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art NY; Socrates Sculpture Park; The Queens Museum of Art; Storefront for Art and Architecture; Smack Mellon; The DUMBO Arts Festival; White Box Art Center; The New Museum's Idea City; The Howl Festival; Lodge Gallery; The Center for Book Arts; and Freight + Volume Gallery. He received an MFA from Brooklyn College and a BA from Naropa University. Jablon has an upcoming solo exhibition this spring at Arts + Leisure and Freight + Volume in New York, NY.
Paolo Javier is the author of four full-length books of poetry, including Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books, 2015). Flugschriften will be publishing Aklopolis, a limited edition book and sound collaboration with Listening Center (aka David Mason) in spring 2016.
Sophie Malleret is a poet and performer who has read with Sam Jablon at the Howl Festival, Art in Odd Places, Pulse Art Fair, and Freight + Volume. She has worked with Bob Holman in performing her poems in bilingual versions at Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Café, the Amherst Library, and The Cornelia Street Café.
Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and a bilingual (Japanese & English) writer. She writes poetry, haiku, art criticism, travelogues, anti-novels, and keeps journals. She has read at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, Queens Museum, MoMA PS1, Issue Project Room, The Stone, Bowery Poetry Club, The Shed Space, Smack Mellon, Storefront Art & Architecture (all in New York City), and in other venues in France, Germany and Japan. Her publications include Small Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Hand of the Poet (UDP), Garden: A Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), PINK (Sisyphus Press), and A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Museum (Propaganda Press). Her latest books are STUDY (& Other Poems on Art) (UDP) and Elements (Feral Press). Her poem "Con Amore" was nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2015. She writes regularly for the critical writing forum www.arteidolia.com.
Barry Schwabsky is the art critic for The Nation and writes about poetry and related subjects for Hyperallergic Weekend. He has published three books of poetry, most recently Trembling Hand Equilibrium (New York: Black Square Editions, 2015). Imminently forthcoming is his new collection of essays The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (New York and London: Verso, 2016).
Turi Scalora is an Italian chef, art teacher and performance artist based in New York City. In 2012, he left his teaching career to fully dedicate himself to the culinary arts and to found Akrai Residency, a non-profit program that comprises art and cuisine. His culinary interventions are a reflection on the edibility and digestion of contemporary culture and its relation to the concept of nourishment.