Um Livro Sobre A Morte at MuBE

_New works will be exhibited in Brazil to coincide with A Book About Death this February

_Finally a post that isn’t about hands or stamps or grids and choice. Not because I’m done riding that train; but there are other projects in the works.

One of these is the artist call for works to compliment the A Book About Death exhibit that will open in São Paulo, Brazil at MuBE, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura this February.
A new blog by Angela Ferrara details information for the call as well as the continuing life of the ABAD project, originated by artist Matthew Rose.
A Book About Death is Um Livro Sobre a Morte in Portuguese and seems to roll off the tongue as it highlights the international contributions of this exhibition.
Ferrara’s blog continues to build on the original ABAD blog with the new works submitted to the project exhibited online as they are received. The blog is nicely done with information about MuBE, the original exhibition of ABAD as well as downloadable poster art. The artist’s works as well as links to their websites and blogs are posted making this a great global networking opportunity.
With many new artists contributing to the MuBE project the range of dialogue and voice continues to expand and refresh the original exhibition. Submissions deadline is January 30, 2010 but be forewarned that regular mail to Brazil can take several weeks.

My submission: No Books for the Dead ©evertson09

Both my original piece for the Emily Harvey exhibit and the second piece I made for the Queens Museum’s Dia de los Muertos exhibit contained a insert with poetry. This latest piece continues the insert tradition while the imagery diverges. Although I’ve long used type, topography and words in my art, it really has only been in the last year or so that I’ve had any confidence or desire to include any “real” writings as part of a work. Thinking that the images needed to stand-alone for the viewers interpretation to work, I avoided the literal use of words in favor of their shape or their use as a compositional element. An element that usually played a rather minor role in the overall effect I wanted in a work. The mail art nature of this project allows me to use the envelope nature of my images to include a “letter”.

Poetry insert to my card ©evertson09

The three pieces I’ve created to date for the ABAD projects involve differing methods of creating the word and image interaction. My original piece began with the writing portion. Afterwards I staged a photograph to accompany the word. In the second piece (for the Queens Museum) I created the image and worked out a poem based on the image. In this piece for MuBE, the image and word creation intermixed and I found myself back and forth as I modified each in tandem.

Sitting in front of the TV and watching death a step removed from its reality is something we live with at an ever-increasing rate. Never mind make believe video game violence; we are exposed to sanitized death at a velocity unimaginable to our generations before. Welcome to virtual death or abstract death. The individual visual and sound bite describing extremely horrific events are sandwiched together; and glossed until the scale of our collective death toll is incomprehensible. A famine, a genocide, a homicide and war casualties can fit easily in the first five minutes of news spilling from the lips of our news anchors.

In our surreal situation, death is not real unless it happens to you on TV; and a significant market share sits back and watches.