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Jon Rowe + Brian Spadafora

APRIL 29 – May 23, 2014

Jon Rowe Where is the Black Beast? was created by stringing thousands of found photos together into a visual narrative based on the poetry of Ted Hughes. This “collaboration” with hundreds of anonymous photographers realizes the intensity of Hughes’ poetry in a cinematic form. Where is the Black Beast? begins with Lineage, a poem that abridges The Book of Genesis into 21 lines and from which the protagonist Crow emerges. A journey then begins that takes us from Oedipus’ familial catastrophe to Crow’s mad battle with the sun. Jon Rowe about statement

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Brian Spadafora This four-screen video projection is a collaboration with Algis Kizys, who composed the soundtrack. “The process of editing the film was a constant negotiation between sound, picture, poetry and spoken voice,” Lee says. Eventually, ten distinct ‘chapters’ emerged, seamlessly combining the unidentified, unnamed figures in those photos with the primeval angst reflected in Hughes’ poems. As Lee relates: “I read Crow: The Life and Songs of the Crow, by Ted Hughes, at sixteen. The visceral darkness of the imagery, set in a familiar landscape, resonated deeply with my own dark view of the world. I saw Crow as a story of a civilization with an impending apocalypse, mythologized through twentieth century imagery. Rich visual images saturate the poetry, and their rhythm and mechanics begged to be translated into film. In Leonard Baskin’s drawings of an obdurate crow fixed solidly to the ground, hubris reigns. These drawings are not, in fact, illustrations for the poetry, but the original visual inspiration for Hughes’ writing. Later, upon becoming an artist, I knew I wanted to return to that text. I wanted to somehow translate those dark, eerie metaphors and phrases back to a visual language, this time using the conventions of cinema.” Jon Rowe about statement

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About STARTyourself

STARTyourself affords students the exciting opportunity to submit a proposal to curate an exhibition at START Gallery or organize a solo exhibition of their own artwork in the gallery space.