Presented by Noho M55 Gallery

I spend a lot of time writing and many who do, often also make visual work. I have appreciated the thoughts of the Canadian-American poet Mark Strand (1934-2014) who studied painting with Josef Albers at Yale and completed an MFA while attending the Iowa Writers Workshop. He said, “I started making collage as an escape from making meaning. I got tired of writing poems, of trying to make sense – verbal sense. It is a relief to make a different kind of sense – visual sense. One must think, of course, but it is an entirely different kind of thinking, one in which language does not intrude.” Making collage is quite a distance from putting together sentences, stanzas and/or paragraphs; letters can be simply shapes, sizes, colors and/or directional and spatial cues rather than proper placements in lines of communication. And then, writing can be a respite from the many sheer physicalities of making visual art.