In 2006, Portland poet Ben Moorad invited me to participate in a collaboration that would culminate in an exhibition of visual work. Ben composed a suite of nine poems, entitled The Hidden Black of Milk to which I responded visually. The exhibition ran the month of October 2007at Ogle Gallery in Portland, Oregon and included a performance by the poet. This is the artist's statement that appeared in the exhibition of work.



A R T I S T ' S S T A T E M E N T

It’s taken awhile for me to realize that I am lost as a visual artist in the absence of literature. I tried to become a writer myself, but found writing inadequate for expressing the chaotic passion that literature– and books– inspire. All of my visual work springs from an inexplicable and indefatigable love of the word; I am fascinated with the magic that occurs through the careful accumulation of letters. Writers lay down their letters brick by brick; the order, structure and rhythm that writers impose releases words. And words, carefully unfurled, have the power to shake us to the core. Left in chaos, letters are meaningless as a verbal medium, yet have enormous visual potential; it is this potential which I attempt to harness in my work.

The work in this show was developed in collaboration with Ben Moorad, who is fascinated, like I am, not only with the potential power of words, but also with the slipperiness of form and the nagging impossibility of capturing the illogic and chaos of feeling. His poems drift; images coalesce and then dissolve. Themes that linger imperceptibly in the background have but brief moments in the spotlight before receding again; they make their appearance in each of the nine poems, but it is necessary to stay alert. Form and meaning doesn’t hold for long and yet it accumulates; each glimmer builds on the last.

If Ben is dedicated to building meaning out of letters through the imposition of order, I am dedicated to unlocking the potential of letterforms through chaotic accumulation. I draw from literature’s junkyard. When presented with a beautifully ordered set of words, I am irresistibly compelled to break them back down into their base components and recycle them, to make a stab at meaning by riding the slippery edge that separates order from chaos.


Rachel Wiecking