Just Buffalo Orbital Series

Lauren Bender and

Justin Sirois

Thursday, March 30

7pm, Big Orbit Gallery

The history of art is filled with those moving from one medium to another (Warhol, for example, moved from commercial art to fine art to film). The move, however, from plastic to verbal arts is far less common. Next Thursday (March 30), two Baltimore poets come to town who were both trained in the visual arts but have dedicated themselves to poetry. Lauren Bender and Justin Sirois have immersed themselves in poetics to such a degree that each is now responsible for writing, collecting and organizing their own work and the works of others (Bender edits the poetry section of www.peekreview.net and Sirois is founder and creative director of Narrow House Recordings, www.NarrowHouseRecordings.com, a recording label dedicated exclusively to poetry). With their activism and artistry, the question arises, why move to words? Bender and Sirois answered that question in an e-mail interview with Artvoice.

Lauren Bender:

“I always saw text in visual work, painting mostly, as a supplement for inadequate formal ability—a crutch of sorts. So, to appease the verbal part of me, I continued to jot down asides to the drawings I was making and experiencing.

I went to my first poetry reading and was tossed (literally) a poem, by an amazingly aloof but talented guy [Nick Barna—ed.]. I realized that this could be a performative—and therefore visual—venture, and decided I needed to catch up on the language side of things. At the same reading I met Justin Sirois, who also originated from a purely visual background.

Now I can’t not make drawings with words in them. I shy away from the term and genre of visual poetry, but am interested in both the similarities between visual and textual language—and the nuanced performance of both—and the fact that there is still such a separation of them in my own approach/mind.”

Justin Sirois:

“Originally I wanted to be a painter, but that seemed an impossibly daunting and laborious venture that I knew wouldn’t work out. I was terribly undisciplined, didn’t have the eye for it either. During my freshman year I had a work-study job on campus where I could hide for hours in the upstairs stockrooms of the art supply store. I hid a copy of Understanding Media under a shelf of gesso and read it instead of taking inventory. This was the first McLuhan book that made me fall out of love with the mediums of drawing/painting/etching and in love with what they do, or more importantly how they (might) function.

I began reading more and drawing less. Text was always an important element in my visual work, evolving from underground comics to printmaking influences—Bruce Neuman, Christopher Wool—to site-specific installations I experimented with towards the end of college. Marcel Duchamp, Lawrence Weiner and Jennifer Holzer definitely influenced and informed what I was trying to do, but the more I wanted to speak about language and communication technologies the more the (objects) got in the way. The slogans and sentences I was screen printing on walls and ready-mades slowly disappeared and left we with the matrix, the mylar transparency or vegetable oil soaked in Xerox. It was liberating.

All I was left with were the words and that was more than enough. Way more. Almost five years after graduating from college I’ve returned to visual artwork, or a design influenced writing that involves visual elements and web based interactivity. (Right now) it feels like a healthy culmination of everything I love to create, but that feeling never lasts long.”