A Table of Contents - Dorthea Tanning

Current favorites  from Dorthea Tanning's first book of poems, A Table of Contents, published in 2004. 


GRADUATION

He told us, with the years, you will come
To love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
And comforted them.

FORTUNE COOKIES

Blackwidow and bluedaughter will precede a bronze fortune. Wait ninety-one dawns.

Try aulic apples and eco-similies when up a tree. On the next moon's round you will hear a new note.

A fixed star burns the edges of frayed identity. Look underground for knockout denouement.

Swarming doubt surrounds your final forfeit. Your aura is now in orbit. Wear its disguise.

Learn the Erynnian language of thorns. Make a pact with chaos. From then on you won't care.

The faces in the mirror have learned to talk. If you listen they will slash your past ignite your future.

In ten days your eyes will see a glaive. Take it as a sign of promise. Your beauty will explode.

Mix wine with semen and ectoplasm. Throw it out. You shall be richly rewarded.

Wild rapture spins over your personal landscape.  Do not hold your breath in the fire. This sign is bliss.

Entrance to Hell demands grit. After nine days in the ashes you will be walking on air.

Go mad and and you will not become truly insane. Tomorrow you will be chosen.

INSOMNIA, MY COUSIN,


you ride the night machine
witlessly in bedlam,
breathing on my scree,
my panting outdoor movie,
its paid admission being
my square root,
my flashbulb
socket-pinned and joyless.


Insomnia, my cousin,
you have sired nightly
indecent vertigo.
I lie haggard as you drag
your insane engine past 
across the floor,
slamming doors
on all my four dimensions,


leaving me high day
to shred the clotted dream.
Cousin, I repeatedly
betray you with its debris.

Those Who Understand the Myth, Dorthea Tanning August 25, 1910 – January 31, 2012

...There was a muddy center before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

 After holiday gifting her second anthology of poems, Coming to That (Graywolf Press, 2011), we are sad that Dorothea Tanning died at her home in New York City on January 31, 2012.  She was 101 years old. Aunt Anna Cordelia was the same age and studied at the SAIC as well. Did their paths ever cross?  Well, at least in my life's history.

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois and attended Knox College before studying painting in Chicago. In 1941, now in New York, she met the art dealer, Julien Levy, and his surrealist friends, refugees from Nazi occupied France. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. They would have 34 years together, at first in Sedona, Arizona.

Birthday, 1947 

Here she would continue to paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out. By 1956 Max and Dorothea moved to France. Though Paris was headquarters, they preferred the country quiet lure in Touraine and Provence. These years included an intense five‐year adventure in soft sculpture.

Reclining Nude, l969-70

Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976. “Go home,” said the paint tubes, the canvases, the brushes. Returning to the United States in the late 1970s, she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write as well as paint. Her poems have since appeared in a number of literary reviews and magazines, such as The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, The Southwest Review, Parnassus, and in Best Poems of 2002 and 2005. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm.

The Harvest of Research and Image Serendipity

As we think about our own work, coming across images randomly is a joy and a thought twister.

This season's harvest:

Valeri Belin's goddesses of Body Builders II

Paula Muhr's Females Under Tension explores cultural strategies in the construction of femininity, sexuality and desire, as well as normality.

From Paula Muhr's work Double Flower artist statement: “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer called hysterics "the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”.

Julie Cockburn's silly and graphic and crafted figurative and portrait work.

Lindsey Beal's Ambrotypes, Figure 1, 2010

Kate Gilmore's glorious disaster performances - Pace Performance

Frank Kozik's smoking Mao Mouse - a new take on the idea of the bust of patriarch -- from imprint blog

Soho Photo 2011 Alternative Processes Competition

Snakeroot, from Natural History

cyanotype over archival pigment print, 2011

Soho Photo is pleased to announce that its November show will feature the winning entries in the Seventh Annual Alternative Processes Competition.This year’s Alternative Processes Competition presents the winning images of photographers from across the United States. The images that were submitted for this competition represent a wide range of alternative methods that can include beeswax paper negative, Cyanotype, Van Dyke Brown, platinum/palladium, gum dichromate, gold toned salt print, tintype, and ziatype. This year’s juror was gallerist, educator and photographer Michael Paris Mazzeo. As an educator, Mazzeo has long been a practitioner of antiquarian processes; he’s taught at the School of Visual Arts, ICP, New Jersey City University, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design.

The top three winners are:

First Place: Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman, Chicago, IL Second Place: Denyse Murphy, Haverhill, MA Third Place: David Zimmerman, Taos, NM

After judging all the entries, Mazzeo issued a statement, an excerpt of which follows: He said, “My criteria for selecting work for this exhibition included technical proficiency, compelling imagery, and consistency of vision. I looked for work that was intelligent, thoughtful, engaging, entertaining, humorous and challenging, devoid of kitsch, cliché, and the obvious. Above all, my priority was to reward those artists whose work communicated distinct ideas through the effective use of their chosen process.

My top choice was Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman's exquisite portraits of elderly women adorned with botanical specimens by way of cyanotype photograms. An elegant elegy to old age and the passage of time, this work also nicely references Anna Atkins, an English botanist and the first recognized female photographer, who is credited with publishing the first book of photographic illustrations, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 6-8 PM

Gallery Hours: Wednesdays–Sundays, 1–6 PM, and by appointment.

Contact: Wayne Parsons, info@sohophoto.com or 212.662.5532

Clematis, from Natural History

cyanotype over archival pigment print, 2011

We honor Betty

We honor Betty, who made the best pickles ever.

Dill originated in Eastern Europe and is widespread in the Mediterranean basin and West Asia. Several twigs of dill were found in the tomb of Amenhotep II. The earliest archeological evidence for its cultivation comes from late Neolithic lake shore settlements in Switzerland.

In Semitic languages it is know by the name of Shubit. In Marathi, it is know as shepu. The Talmud requires that tithes shall be paid on the seeds, leaves and stem of dill.

The name dill comes from Old English dile, thought to have originated from a Norse or Anglo-Saxon word dylie meaning to soothe or lull, the plant having the carminative peroperty of relieving gas. In Sanskrit, this herb is called Shatapushpa. In Gujrati it is called hariz.

Serious Summer Diversion Leads to Another Notebook

Inspired by sunshine, materials, processes and Anna Atkins, we revisited cyanotypes...one thing leads to another...please follow the change in our new notebook.

processing

Mother's Day on Lenscratch

Aline Smithson's Mother's Day Exhibition on Lenscratch is a touching group of images recalling our mothers in their many guises. Remembering my mother, Betty Ciurej, who was a wonderful baker and supportive of whatever I undertook, even though she was often bewildered by what I was doing. Thanks, mama.