ArtSake

This is one in a series of extremely brief interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Suzanne Matson, the next writer to brave the Q&A shrink ray, reads on Thursday, January 8 at Grub Street in Boston, at 7 PM.

Accomplished as both a novelist and a poet, Suzanne has a uniquely thorough perspective on the writing craft - and, it turns out, on the sport of paintball.

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Suzanne: An historical novel about a family of immigrant, socialist Finns against a backdrop of WWI politics. But it also has a great love story.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Suzanne: I really like reading novels of epic sweep–Tolstoy, Dos Passos, and the like. I wish I could do Epic Sweep, but I end up getting engrossed in closely focused character fiction–although my last novel, The Tree-Sitter, and my current project, The Liberty Committee, are very interested in social and political contexts.

MCC: What’s the most embarrassing sentence/line of poetry you’ve ever written?

Suzanne: Most of them end up in my cyber trash bin, so I can’t remember, but as an undergraduate, I had the honor of having W. S. Merwin poke fun at the first line of a poem I had written: “Winter walks the china sky.” He really didn’t like that line.

MCC: Who wins the poets vs. prose writers paintball war?

Suzanne: My sons, who play paintball, are sure the prose writers would cream the poets. They seem to think poets are too dreamy to get a bead on a target. As someone who writes in both genres, I’m not so sure they’re right: Poets are very attuned, as Ezra Pound once said, to the “pith and gist” of things. That might translate into sharp-shooting talent. Although novelists, used to thinking in plots, might best the poets in battle strategy.

Suzanne joins Kim Adrian, Ben Berman, Xujun Eberlein, and JD Scrimgeour for a reading on Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 PM at Grub Street, 160 Boylston Street, Boston MA. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Suzanne Matson is the author of three novels, most recently, The Tree-Sitter, and two books of poetry. A professor of English and creative writing at Boston College, she lives in Newton with her husband and three sons. Her full list of works is at www.suzannematson.com.

Read all of the nano-interviews.

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This is one in a series of nano-interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series, featuring literary fellows and finalists from our Artist Fellowships Program.

Kim Adrian, the next writer to generously take part, reads on Thursday, January 8 at Grub Street in Boston, at 7 PM.

Kim is an essay, memoir, and short story writer (read a story of Kim’s published in AGNI) whose answers to absurdly brief interview questions are as intriguing and idiosyncratic as her wonderful prose.

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Kim: A memoir called “The Oyster’s Autobiography” and a short story about a boy with a limp called, at least for now, “Why Dim Sum Makes Me Feel Tender.”

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Kim: Thomas Bernhard.

MCC: What’s the best/worst day job you’ve ever had?

Kim: The best was at a bakery in Cambridge… I loved getting up at 5 am & biking over the Charles when nobody was on the road but truckers, & I loved rolling out baguettes & drinking cappuccino with my boss, working together in silence. The worst was as a cashier at DeLuca’s market on Beacon Hill. People were rude & my feet killed from standing all day. Most of all it was suicidally boring. I only lasted one shift.

Kim joins Ben Berman, Xujun Eberlein, Suzanne Matson, and JD Scrimgeour for a reading on Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 PM at Grub Street, 160 Boylston Street, Boston MA. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Kim Adrian has work forthcoming in Tin House, Ninth Letter, and the Raritan Review. Her essays and short stories have appeared in AGNI, The Gettysburg Review, Tin House, Crazyhorse, the New England Review, and elsewhere. In 2008, she received a P.E.N. New England Discovery Award in fiction; and an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress, “The Oyster’s Autobiography,” won the Editors’ Prize in nonfiction at the New Ohio Review. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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In January and February, we’re putting on the Commonwealth Reading Series, featuring literary fellows and finalists from our Artist Fellowships Program. The readings will include both poets and prose writers and will be, to mix vernaculars, all milieus of awesome.

To promote the readings, the participants were invited to take part in miniaturized versions of interviews. The first to do so is poet Ben Berman. Ben will read on Thursday, January 8 at Grub Street in Boston, at 7 PM.

Reading Ben’s answers, I suspected he had a bit of Marx Brothers in his worldview. So I asked, and he confirmed.

Always a good sign for a live reading.

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Ben: A poem called The Great Molasses Flood (what a tidal!) It’s about The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 that killed 21 people in the North End.

MCC: What’s the most surprising reader response you’ve ever received?

Ben: A student once told me that my ears look like they’re made of wax.

MCC: Who wins the poets vs. prose writers paintball war?

Ben: The poets – paintball is an amateur sport – no place for pros.

Ben joins Kim Adrian, Xujun Eberlein, Suzanne Matson, and JD Scrimgeour for a reading on Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 PM at Grub Street, 160 Boylston Street, Boston MA. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Ben Berman has received honors from the New England Poetry Club and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. His poems have been published in Salamander, The Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Connecticut Review and other journals, as well. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and high school English teacher, he now coaches Humanities teachers in the Boston Public Schools.

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Kristin Bock (Poetry Fellow ‘06) recently published the poetry collection Cloisters, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award. We spoke to her about her new book and her art (literary and otherwise), and the conversation ranged from Pre-Raphaelites to stealing her father’s apprentice to the benefit of ungentle critiques to writing about a Space-Age Paul Bunyan. Enjoy!

MCC: Reading Cloisters, I kept jotting down language I loved and found my page filled with it - “I lay my head like a hive in your hands” (from Phrenology); “Inside my chest an apple darkens” (from Scarecrow); “Clearly, she’s ruined./Her face an overripe peach,/her hand a blowzy peony” (from Watercolor Left in a Humid Kitchen). I read Michelle Blackley’s review and was curious to see that my reactions, while equally favorable, were very different from hers. Have any responses to your writing really surprised you?

Kristin: Yes, but pleasantly so. Blackley focuses on the interconnectedness between Nature and the unrequited desires of the speaker. In its early stages, a writer friend of mine labeled the book a “re-appraisal of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” At first this surprised me, but when I thought about the book’s emphasis on the imagination, nature, symbolism, and the divine, and how many of the poems were inspired by Pre-Raphaelite art and philosophy such as The Romantic Sublime, and The Artist as Rossetti’s Sitter, I realized the collection could be read that way. Certainly, the Pre-Raphaelite movement had a significant influence on my writing, and once I embraced this idea, it helped to shape the rest of the book. Aside from its themes, I’m always pleased to hear that people are enjoying the language itself. Like you, many say they like the terse, imagistic quality of the lyric. It’s all in there I suppose, and listening to readers unravel various threads has been enlightening.

MCC: I’m fascinated by your choice to group the poems into five “months” - October, December, February, April, August. It was interesting to see how some of the imagery carried through the different sections, like a cast of characters (bees, birds, apples, bones) set in different landscapes. Was the grouping into months something you had in mind while writing, or a structure that emerged along the way?

Kristin: The structure of the book attempts to document a year of estrangement from a friend. The speaker of the poems struggles with the idea of letting go and resists grief, as if completing the process would mean some form of forgetting which is unacceptable. Nonetheless, the book is divided into sections which loosely mirror the five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and finally a kind of acceptance, or in this case - forgiveness. Because most poems are set in the New England landscape, I found they reflected the passing seasons and fell naturally into sections. I think the repetition of certain images or a “cast of characters” comes from my propensity to see the world, especially the pastoral, in terms of symbols. I didn’t consciously set out to write “symbolic” poems, however, after I wrote about 20 or so, I began to notice the ubiquitous bird and apple and bee, and once I did, I let them evolve and take center stage.

MCC: I know, apart from your poetry, that you’ve worked with your husband (Geoff Kostecki) to refurbish liturgical paintings and sculptural iconography. I’m curious whether this work finds its way into your writing. I’m thinking of - and I apologize if this reading is too literal! - the poem Restoring the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. Is there overlap?

Kristin: Absolutely. Painting has influenced my work from the very beginning. My father was a still-life artist, a realist, and I was always at his side watching him paint. His paintings made me aware of texture, the qualities of light, and the language between objects at a very early age. They facilitated my understanding of symbolism and metaphor and nurtured my love for dark imagery. In short, art taught me the vocabulary of poetry. One of my first poems was inspired by my father’s painting of a naked china doll with its eyes extracted, a dark hole on top of its head where hair should have been. I imagined if I could peer down inside its head, I would find a lost button, some balls of dust, or a few dried bees. The doll was cocked awkwardly to one side, and its right arm stretched out to the viewer. I was frightened and fascinated at the same time, and as despairing as it may seem, I came to identify with the doll, and it became my first conscious metaphor. As Emily Dickinson writes in her poem “Tis So Appalling — It Exhilarates”–”the Truth is Bald and Cold.”

When I was older, and to my father’s dismay, I stole his one and only apprentice and we married. The restoration work I do with my husband finds its way into my poetry much the same way my father’s did. I guess you could say it was an easy transition! You’re right; the poem Restoring the Fourteen Stations of the Cross is the best example of this cross-fertilization. While refurbishing fourteen very large stations in bas-relief for nearly a year, bending over the figures, mending their broken limbs, sanding, scraping, painting them, becoming intimate with each scene and its symbolism, I had the sensation of literally being the hand that created them. Therefore, the speaker of the poem emerged as the voice of God.

Similarly, the poem Washing the Feet of Crucifix was written while painting a life-size figure of Christ inside a mausoleum. I found myself on my knees washing the feet of Jesus. As a former Catholic, myth and idolatry are ingrained in my psyche, and like it not, they still have a hold on me. Fortunately, tending to the idols of my childhood has been strangely provocative. There is a tenderness involved, an intimacy, and certainly a blasphemous thrill too (I often have to refrain from painting Mary’s toenails red). I believe it was T.S. Eliot who branded himself a “Doubting Believer,” and it’s that inner conflict that keeps me interested in the work and makes rich fodder for poems.

As far as the title is concerned, a cloister is a part of monastic, medieval architecture. It consists usually of four corridors with a courtyard in the middle, intended to be both covered from the rain, but open to the air. While most poems in the book are pastoral in setting, albeit enclosed pastorals such as bower meadows, the hermetic vision of the speaker leads us into the interior of the Self. Cloisters served the primary function of quiet meditation or study gardens. In this way, I like to think of each poem as a cloister, a place that offers regeneration through Nature, devotions, reflection, and solitude. In this respect, my work as a poet and as a restorationist is similar in its aims.

MCC: In an interview* with fellow Montague poets Chris Janke and Elizabeth Hughey (who won a poetry fellowship in 2008), you mentioned that you have found a thriving poetry community there in Western Mass. Do you still meet with a writing group? What makes a group like that work?

Kristin: I owe a debt of gratitude to my writer’s group for their role in Cloisters‘ publication. I wrote the majority of the book in 2004 and sent the manuscript to about 15 contests, placing as a semi-finalist in one of them. My group gave the manuscript a stiff haircut and I got busy revising it. When I sent the manuscript out a second time, I placed 12 times as a semi-finalist and won the Tupelo Press First Book Award. Not surprisingly, I’m still meeting with my group and their presence in my life as poets and close friends is invaluable to me. I believe what makes our particular group work well is our respect for each other as poets and people. Just as important, our critiques are not gentle.

MCC: What’s next for you?

Kristin: If my husband had his way, I’d convert completely to a painter and we’d spend our nights sleeping on scaffolding in dark churches. I’m still doing restoration work with him, but lately I’ve been sitting for a series of portrait paintings inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s work and the imagery in Cloisters. It’s our first official collaboration.

I’m also writing poems that are very different from the ones in Cloisters. Instead of looking to nature, the past and inward, I’ve turned my gaze outward—to space and technology. When I told a friend of mine I’m thinking of writing a book of folktales from the future, he said “will Paul Bunyan brandish a light saber instead of an ax?” “Yes,” I said, “I think he will.”

Kristin Bock’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including Cream City Review, The Seattle Review, Prairie Schooner, The Black Warrior Review, and FENCE. Cloisters is her first book.

* Incidentally, the interview with Kristin, Liz Hughey, and Chris Janke was conducted by Andrew Varnon, who won an MCC Poetry fellowship in 2004.

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It’s deadline day for our Artist Fellowships applications (Fri, Dec. 5). Which means: not so much time for blogging today. But interesting stuff is still happening all over the wonder-ific web-o-sphere, and here’s some of it:

Elizabeth Graver, Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow from 2006 (and terrific writer and mind), gives Paper Cuts (the NY Times book blog) some tantalizing details about her next writing project.

HubArts reports on an effort to score some Berklee profs the gig to perform at President-elect Obama’s inauguration.

Innovative theater director Anne Bogart ponders how snapping cellphone pictures in art museums reveals a society that consumes, rather than engages, its art.

The Independent Film Festival of Boston announced Dec. 31 as the deadline in their call for entries for films, including narrative and documentary features, short films, animated, experimental, horror, and GLBT interest works. More info at the Filmmakers Workshop page (a resource of the Center for Independent Documentary).

New England Film explores the LEF Foundation’s recent changes in its Moving Image Fund.

Berkshire artists who want to buy homes but also want homebuyer training have the perfect confluence of their wants in these meetings at Berkshire Bank in Pittsfield. From Assets for Artists.

Congratulations to Boston poet Henri Cole, who recently received a 2009 NEA Fellowship in Poetry.

Good stuff from our fellows/finalists
Ben Berman (Poetry Fellow ‘08) has received a Pushcart Prize nomination from The Raintown Review.

Julie Mallozzi (Film & Video Finalist ‘07) has announced the launch of 60.30.1, an 11-site installation over three campuses of Harvard University. The light installation commemorates the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Julie is the project’s artistic director, and the official launch is at 5pm on Monday, December 8 outside Widener Library (Harvard Yard, Cambridge).

Rania Matar (Photography Fellow ‘07) speaks as part of an artist talk with the 2008 James and Audrey Foster Prize Finalists at ICA Boston, on Sunday, December 7, 1 PM.

More Fellows Notes.

And finally: GalleyCat created and posted a video interview with Joan Wickersham (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ‘08), conducted at the National Book Awards ceremony (her memoir The Suicide Index was a finalist for the award). It’s fascinating insight into her writing process.

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Joan Wickersham (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ‘08) has just published The Suicide Index, a haunting, beautifully written memoir exploring her father’s suicide through an unlikely structure - the index. Julia Glass (author of Three Junes and The Whole World Over) called the book “just astonishing.” Winner of the Ploughshares 2007 Cohen Award, Joan is author of the novel The Paper Anniversary (Viking 1993), and along with publishing short prose in numerous journals and The Best American Short Stories anthology, she created a fascinating column called The Lurker for Architecture Boston.

Joan will be a guest on NPR’s On Point this Monday, August 4. She’ll read from The Suicide Index at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, on Thursday, August 7, at 7 PM.

Joan recently shared her thoughts on the paradox of indexing human experience, architecture in writing, and being patient with your story.

MCC: The structure of your memoir is fascinating. In a chapter called “Suicide: psychological impact of” (excerpted on the Gallery @ MCC), you write about your father’s suicide by way of objects and places: a garbage bag of his old paperwork, a boat sold to a friendly stranger, and the houses he lived in. How did you arrive at the unique structure – using an index as a way of focusing your prose?

Joan: I tried all kinds of tidier, more conventional ways of telling the story: novel, chronological memoir. Nothing worked, and I finally realized that the experience of my father’s death, and my own trying to piece it together, was by nature fragmentary and circular. The structure had to somehow reflect the chaotic character of the experience, but I didn’t want the book to feel chaotic. The index is something of a paradox: it is inherently numb and formal, but it allows all the intense feelings to be as wild as they need to be.

MCC: I’m curious about “The Lurker,” your column for Architecture Boston magazine. Do you see any intersection between architecture and writing? Does writing about architecture inform the way you write prose?

Joan: “The Lurker” is about architecture and design, but it’s really about people and events and bits of overheard dialogue. It’s eavesdropping on a profession, the same way a fiction writer or memoirist eavesdrops on life.

There’s another connection between The Suicide Index and architecture – which, quite literally, has to do with structure. When I first thought of organizing the pieces as an index, I wasn’t sure it would work. My husband, who is an architect and lawyer, said, “Think of the index as a parti.” It’s a concept that originated with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and that is still used in architecture schools – you commit to a parti, or basic design scheme, at the beginning of a project. The initial parti might not survive in the final design, but it gets you going and gives you some parameters as you proceed. So I went ahead with the index, thinking that at least it would help me get the pieces down on paper and I could always jettison it later. But not only did it work as a prompting device, it also became a meaningful way of structuring the book.

MCC: How long did this book take to complete?

Joan: Eleven years. A lot of that was writing versions that didn’t work, putting them aside, and letting them sit for a while before I could see how I might approach the story differently.

MCC: You’ve also published a novel (The Paper Anniversary, Viking 1993). Do you approach memoir differently from the way you approach fiction?

Joan: I don’t think so much about approaching different genres differently. I think more about approaching the story. If you’re patient enough, I think you eventually figure out how a particular story needs to be told. And part of what this book is about is the struggle with genre, and my own obsession with how to tell the story.

But the fact that I’ve written two such different books makes me hope that I’ll remember to be patient with my next one, and with my own initial floundering. My mother always says, “Every time you cook a turkey, it’s your first turkey.” I think the same is true for books.

MCC: What are you working on now?

Joan: I’ve been writing some linked short stories, and have also started to write the (very rough) first draft of a novel that may or may not work. I’d love to do more “Lurker” pieces about people in other professions, and maybe turn that into a book.

But it’s all happier stuff.

Joan Wickersham will be a guest on NPR’s On Point on Monday, August 4. She’ll read from The Suicide Index at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, on Thursday, August 7, at 7 PM.

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Salvatore Scibona - one of our Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellows from 2006 - has garnered auspiciously good reviews for his novel The End. See why at three upcoming readings: Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on Tuesday, July 1, 7 PM; Newtonville Books (with Darin Strauss) on Sunday, July 13, 2 PM; and Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport on Friday, July 18, 7 PM.

We spoke to Salvatore about the first-book experience, “seeing” as a character, and the delicate balance of writing fiction.

MCC: You’re someone who’s worked with many authors (Salvatore administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown). So I’d assume, going into the release of The End, you were already pretty familiar with the literary world. What’s been most surprising to you about the experience of publishing a book?

Salvatore: My local Provincetown bookseller tells me that on the day the book came out, he sold a copy to a woman from New Hampshire, a tourist, the wife of a retired minister. It sounded interesting, she said; she liked the cover. What could be more commonplace than a person on a walk in a small town stopping to buy a book and taking it home?

But also, what could be more unlikely, more uncanny from a writer’s point of view, than that a stranger he will never know should walk down a street with years of the writer’s thoughts in her bag? A book is such an elegant technology, something so complex in such a crude device.

I hadn’t thought of that before the bookseller described this woman in an email. I mean, the book is just wood and ink. All this trouble to make an object about the weight of a grapefruit or a cup of sand. I’m surprised and consoled by that. All I’m doing is making this little thing to put in a woman’s purse.

MCC: Several reviewers have compared you to Saul Bellow. How do you react to the comparison?

Bellow published my first story in the sixth number of News from the Republic of Letters, one of several journals he started over the years with Keith Botsford. I have to confess I hadn’t read Bellow at the time except for a story and a short novel that had made little impression on me. It was only years later, after The End was almost finished, that I woke up to him and read Humboldt’s Gift and Herzog and many of the other novels and fell in love.

If there’s any reasonable comparison between The End and Bellow’s novels, I think it’s that they both involve characters for whom the objects of passion and intellect overlap. The characters get worked up over ideas. What I love in Bellow, and what some of the characters in The End would have loved in him if they were readers-none of my characters are intellectuals, like so many of Bellow’s are-is the exuberance with which he depicts the life of the mind.

It’s a mistake to ascribe the erudition of Bellow’s characters to an old-world insistence that literature must concern elevated ideas. Bellow is an American, like his Chicago-born Augie, and goes “at things as [he has] taught himself, free-style” which in Bellow’s case is also an American style: with great self-assurance and reckless faith in the power of passion and will over reason. The ideas are there because they are part of life, not because they explain life.

And yet explicit ideas take on a greater urgency in Bellow than in any other 20th-century American writer I know, because his characters feel the ideas so deeply. Think of poor Herzog, writing his letters to the great dead geniuses of the past, and of the other Bellow narrators looking with such tenderness and admiration at the dynamo minds of Ravelstein and Humboldt. People don’t just think ideas in a Bellow novel; they experience them.

MCC: You’ve had four readings so far, in New York and Cape Cod. Have any readers surprised you with unexpected takes on your work?

Salvatore: I hadn’t expected that there would be such a diversity of opinion about which character was the emotional center of the book. Some readers have told me they identified most closely with Mrs. Marini, the 93-year-old abortionist who I think of as the book’s central figure; others identified with the young father Enzo; others with the Jeweler; others with Rocco, the Christian baker whose faith abandons him.

Whenever I ran aground on a problem I could not solve, a thing or a scene I didn’t know how to characterize or an opinion I felt uncomfortable adopting, I always reminded myself of a piece of advice from the writer Roger Skillings-R.D. Skillings-that I must see as the character sees. That is, to empathize. If this weren’t a moral commandment, it would be a technical one. As Mrs. Marini notes in her cold way: “Empathy was only another shiny tool, like the speculum, for opening up and evacuating.”

That was a sort of first principle, but I didn’t foresee that it would result in characters that were so different from one another and certainly from me.

My ideal wasn’t that they should all be likeable, but that they should be like themselves.

MCC: Am I correct that this book took over a decade to write? What remains of the original idea, the book you started writing ten years ago?

Salvatore: The finished novel is like a house that stands on the ruins of a previous house that stood on the ruins of another house that was built on a meaningless little patch of ground.

The story began with a speck of observation: the menacing sound of a man’s shoes in a stairwell. Then he gets to a door at the top of the stairs. What’s behind the door? That’s all I had.

I had no pre-existing idea of setting, time, character, plot, theme. I observed and tried to stay out of the way. I didn’t want to impose on the freedom of the characters. At the same time, I was composing a novel, which arranges free action so as to culminate in a way that seems, to some degree, inevitable.

That’s what took so long (it’s all true about the ten years, alas). If a writer makes the characters obey his scheme, the characters lose their freedom and the novel becomes just a confection, an allegory. On the other hand, if the writer exercises no control over the characters’ actions, the novel becomes incoherent. I wanted to create an illusion of freedom in an unfree fictional world.

Which seems to have taken a long time.

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Recently, we posted an Artist to Artist featuring novelist Karl Iagnemma (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ‘02) and installation artist Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘07) discussing science and technology in their art.

In an interview to gather material for the piece, Brian spoke on a number of topics we didn’t have room to include in the Artist to Artist dialogue. Below are some “outtakes,” where his imaginative mind ranges from cell suicide to arts funding to an installation artist’s version of lab research. Intriguing stuff!

On working with scientific concepts in his art
Brian: The way I find deeper meaning is to somehow make associations between the science and questions we all have. So you can look at… there’s this process which I find really fascinating, called apoptosis. It’s basically the process of programmed cell death. Say a cell is damaged, its DNA is damaged, maybe from radiation. So the cell has a process where it’s checking its DNA all the time, and it finds it’s damaged. And so it can decide well, let me try to fix it, or it can decide I can’t fix it and I’m going to kill myself. And that process, of making that decision to commit suicide or not, they’ve found out recently is extra-cellular, meaning it doesn’t do it in isolation. It actually sends signals out to its neighbors, and they signal back to it. And somehow, some consensus is made, and the cell decides whether to kill itself or not.

There are all these metaphors–consensus of a suicide, the decisions we make in our lives, how we might think we’re in isolation, but actually, we’re constantly extending, having interactions with people around us. But the other interesting thing is, the scientist who was explaining this to me said that cells have no state of partial death. In other words, if you look at the signaling mechanism, the actual chemistry, that figures out whether it’s going to kill itself or not, it’s a switch. It’s not a lever. It’s yes, I’m going to kill myself, or no, I’m not. So when I hear that, and I think about cell suicide, I start thinking about how we all live in a state of partial death. There’s a lot there to explore, about the ways we hold ourselves back, about anxiety, neurosis, all these ways that we are not very present in the moment. I’m not saying that there’s this exact connection–at all. It’s the metaphorical connection that fascinates me. So I can make a piece using the science, which hits people on two levels. One, it’s sort of cool science. And the other is that there’s a deeper meaning to it, which I think hopefully can speak on a more unconscious level, and a deeper level, and maybe create some sort of transformative experience. When I have both of those, that’s when I feel like I make some of my best work. (more…)

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On Tuesday, April 29 at 4:30 PM, Barbara O’Brien, Director of the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College, will moderate a roundtable discussion with three MCC 2007 Photography Fellows: Anne Rearick, Rania Matar and Claire Beckett.

The discussion marks the opening of Uncommon Denominator, a new photography exhibition running through May 30 at the Trustman. The exhibition features photography by 10 2007 Fellows and Finalists.

”I’m so excited about this show,” says O’Brien, “ând its depth, quality and range of ideas.” She’s interested in the way the artists’ work reflects the documentary tradition, from both a political and a personal perspective, and the intersection of the two.

Since starting at Simmons in 2006, O’Brien, who oversees the arts administration program in addition to directing the gallery, has specialized in organizing group shows “that create dialogue.” She often selects artists that don’t know each other, or several artists from Boston along with one from outside the region. O’Brien, who previously served as editor-in-chief of Art New England for four years, brings an uncommon perspective to her assessment of the Massachusetts contemporary art scene, having served as a critic, curator and photographer in her own right.

As the curator of a college gallery, O’Brien feels a responsibility to create opportunities for artists that commercial galleries do not. She sees the density of colleges and universities in the region as the biggest asset to its professional art scene.

(more…)

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