Some meeting thoughts from July 12

overall:

talk about how collaboration can happen, gave ourselves & each other assignments

process(es):

- hari read poems from "the elegy suite" (attached); a set of poems that have been coming since he began grieving the impending end of his first book's apprenticeship of him. they are linked and also their own. 

- brainstorming happened, some great ideas around sequences and non-sequences of art pieces in conversation with each other
--a cool thing happened: the poetry conjured up visual ideas. brainstorming through the senses: how would this piece smell/taste/feel/look... 

- "narratives layered on top of histories" / "unresolved" / : naomi showed a couple of collage / paintings in which the undeniability of layers / lenses were a key factor, alongside juxtaposition of textures (more on this?)

- naomi shared the book "the terrain of memory" which she has been thinking about a lot lately (more on this / excerpt n?)
-- naomi wants to work with the idea of perspective visually with layers.
--the book has beautiful way of layering personal and political history of japanese canadians that reverberates a lot with her. first book that has ever done that for her, and is inspiring a direction of the layering thing she is thinking about in 2-d work.

- "the light seems to be vacuuming the sky towards it": elisa shared some painting "drafts" that brought a mix of textures, of stark pronounced strokes with ink bleed and soft textures..
--elisa shared that she wanted to work with those images somehow. 

* one thing we noticed is how short poems or excerpts from longer pieces seem to give more opening for creating visual work

* layering, uncovering, looking thru, hierarchies of so-called purity, reaching, trying to grasp... 

two specific assignments:

1) via naomi: each visual / photo artist pick a short excerpt of a poem and do some writing / visual brainstorming based on that and send / bring to each other for further generation

2) via elisa: take the poem ode to ghost valley and do some preliminary sketches / image gathering and share back at next meeting, from which hari will write some work. continue working on the pieces and see what happens when the poems & the more completed pieces 

3) a long list of images that hari will send out in another email
--for example: "ode to ghost valley" we spent time on how the poem feels, and then what images from what specific parts really jumped out. for me it was rocks, family, tree, dead branch, prayer, offering, earth, body, skin. Or in "water soluble" we spent time looking at how images overlap/disrupt/play into the way the poem is sounds.

next meeting:

can it be next saturday (21st july)?