Visual Poetry: New Vistas
Arts Center of the Capital Region
265 River St
Troy, N.Y.
Through Dec. 20
Yeachin Tsai’s thick brush strokes start with the gestures of Chinese calligraphy but loosen into poetic abstraction. His vivid piece “Birds Migrate over Sea” evokes the movement of birds over white caps without strictly representing them. Instead, black and white acrylics whirl like wings or waves before tones of blazing copper. In the playful “Summer Orange,” fruit wedges take flight like a flock of gulls.
Tsai’s work appears in the Visual Poetry: New Vistas exhibition at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy. The exhibition is two shows melded together, explained co-curator Joseph Mastroianni: Both interpret the theme of visual poetry to varying degrees of abstraction. As in poetry, there’s room for traditional meter and rhyme, but there’s room for experimental free verse, too.
One show-within-a-show, Visual Poetry + Color, showcases the work of 44 artists from outside of the New York State capital region. Each artist contributed one eight-inch square panel, which adorned the walls of the gallery arranged in stanza-like grids that call to mind the strict form of traditional verse.
These works largely embody the concept of visual poetry in more concrete terms. Most include snippets of enigmatic poetry, or they incorporate text, as in Carl T Chew’s “Liar Liar Liar.”
Some contributors chose to rebel against the rigidity of formal language. Cecil Touchon, in his Typographic Abstractions collages, shatters letters and rearranges them into wordless shapes to “free [them] from their burden of being bearers of meaning,” according to the artist’s statement.
Enveloping this display of miniatures is the larger show-within-theshow, New Vistas. Here, eight local artists engage with the theme of visual poetry in a much looser sense. This show, which includes Tsai’s striking paintings, might be called the free verse portion of the exhibition. Less constrained by size and structure, the artists play with form and format. Mastroianni explained that the gallery chose not to segregate each artist’s work into their own sections, but instead allowed them to blend into each other.
More than one of the contributors played with that ubiquitous form of commercial lyricism, the fortune cookie. Exhibition co-curator Willie Marlowe incorporated some of the confectionary compositions into miniature collages with bright acrylic paint. Mary Kathryn Jablonski folded paper cookies with messages like “Simplicity of character… is not a sin” and “Advice, when most needed… is usually bulls — .”
Viewers were gently invited to take part in a collective work of visual poetry collage on pillars throughout the gallery. The medium: plain black text stuck and rearranged on a white canvas. In other words, magnetic poetry, recontextualized from its typical milieu of the North American refrigerator.
“Visual Poetry: New Vistas” runs at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, 265 River St., through December 20. The gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
