As a student, I was intrigued by the opportunities that opened up at the intersection of language and visual art, as demonstrated by people like Barbara Kruger and Tom Phillips. More recently Curator's Office featured a project by Jenny Holzer. While there's been a lot of activity at the intersection with sound/music in the last five years, there's been much less cross-pollenation with the written word.

About a year ago, DC poet Buck Downs showed me a work-in-progress, a poem built painstakingly from rubbings from tombstones. He's going to exhibit the finished piece at DCAC later this month!

Dec 16 - Jan 22:
In Memory D Thompson by Buck Downs
Opening Reception
December 16 th 7-9pm, DC Arts Center,
2438 18th St., N.W., Washington DC

A series of visual poems created by rubbing words from the names and related inscriptions found on headstones in historic Congressional Cemetery, Washington DC. Equal parts ghost story and concrete poem, each sequence teases out a mysterious syntax buried in the names of the dead. Buck Downs is a poet and book artist, publisher of Buck Downs Books.

This past summer I wrote a short blurb about the poem:

somewhere I once read, "a typeface is to a text as a soundtrack is to a movie." mr. downs, {the poet laureate of the database, of compressed, cinematic time,} remixes borrowed words from dead men. the graphite halos of each ghosted word or so fills a complete page, like yelling, or cranking it up to 11. this soundtrack is the echo of the nineteenth century, when washington, dc was not an arial city, when public words were GRAND and flourished in stone, rather than plastic. he redeems the brevity and shallowness of modern words {soundbites, ad jingles, leet texting,} setting those forms to the task of describing the history of everyone, everywhere. he keeps cranking it up 'till the cops come.