núna (now) is pleased to present the launch of Jaik Josephson’s volume of poetry, 97 Positions of the Heart, coinciding with the Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers’ adaptation of his book, which performs May 10 through 13th at the Rachel Browne Theatre. The recent launches of new books by Michael Benjamin Brown and Sylvia Matas will also be celebrated at this event.
97 Positions of the Heart is a lyrical travelogue through the courageous life of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945). Poet Jaik Josephson mines both her biography and literary catalogue to escort the reader into her remarkable world. Each poem charts Smart’s persistent quest to resist the forces that sought to claim and silence her. Text is paired with illustrations by Erin Josephson-Laidlaw to reveal a vast emotional range that meditates upon Elizabeth’s bewildering childhood, a tumultuous romantic pairing with English writer, George Barker, the experience of motherhood and her pursuit of a prosaic language that speaks a truth about life in the social margins.
Michael Benjamin Brown’s Winterhouses is an ‘unsequenced’ group of 60 pages of images and language. Symbols, ranging from the scientific to the mythological, the numinous to the beautiful, and the mysterious to the matter-of-fact weave throughout the work, while changing form on any given page. Metamorphosing interpretation occurs through individual’s random arrangements. Viewers might conjure narratives or simply a singular impression.
Sylvia Matas’s In Every Direction consists of images and text. There is no narrative – it is more of an incomplete collection of information that describes overlapping mental and physical environments. There are references to (among other things) sound and movement through time and space, in and out of intensity and in and out of focus.
Exhibition up May 17 – May 24