Poetry and visual art historically and continuously have had a complementary relationship. William Carlos Williams gives lush description to a Breughel painting in his poem, The Fall of Icarus while Hieronymus Bosch brutally illustrates Dante’s Inferno to create his didactic hell-scapes.
Ineffable Green Thing continues in this Ekphrastic lineage by featuring the work of Gunnison-based painter Anders Johnson and Chicago-based poet Kristy Odelius. Johnson can trace roots of his creative painting process back to his participation in Odelius’ Introduction to Creative Writing course during undergraduate school. In that course, Odelius taught students how to construct poetry through the process of juxtaposing language to create visual textures, teaching her students how meaning can be derived from structure and form in a poem. As part of his painting process, Johnson continues to translate these early lessons in creating narrative meaning through combining and constructing visual imagery in a similar way.
This exhibition features recent written work by Odelius and visual work by Johnson. Using the lens of their respective mediums, both artists derive inspiration from extracting memories of certain places and cultural histories. Through seeing the layered rhythms in Odelius’ poetry and reading the layered stories in Johnson’s paintings, viewers will have an opportunity to explore the divergent concurrences of language and image while also discovering the similarities that echo through the work.
