Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders Presentations will Feature Obstruction Island Visual Artist and NYC Poet

Dianne Kornberg – Contributed photo

Visual artist Dianne Kornberg and poet, Elisabeth Frost, will be presenting a series of Art As A Voice talks on Lopez, San Juan, and Orcas Islands during October. Kornberg’s work with Frost is featured in the exhibition, For All We Know on display through November 28th at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art (SJIMA) in Friday Harbor. Kornberg, an Obstruction Island resident, collaborates with Frost to make photo-based digital prints that incorporate poetic text.

Kornberg relies on her knowledge of the conventions of scientific collection, preservation, and notation to create beautiful fictional specimen pages. “These works both honor and question the creation of knowledge, employing visual allusions and poetic text to create alternate ways of understanding the ‘evidence’ before us,” says Kornberg.

Both women have held artist residencies in the Whiteley Center at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories where Kornberg made some of the photographs used in the exhibition. What Is Left, a meditation on dying and grief, is a singular piece in the exhibition. “It moves between the abstract and the concrete, in both image and text, to explore the charged and disorienting experience of grief,” says Frost.

Dianne Kornberg has been exhibiting her artwork nationally and internationally for more than three decades. She is a Professor Emerita at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Her work is in several important museum collections, including those of the International Center for Photography, the Princeton Art Museum, the Houston Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum. Her work appears in multiple book publications, and is the subject of four monographs.

Elisabeth Frost’s books include All of Us: Poems, Bindle (collaborations with artist Dianne Kornberg), and the chapbooks A Theory of the Vowel. She is also the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews. She is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University, where she edits the Poets Out Loud Prize book series.

ART AS A VOICE EVENTS:

• Friday, October 7 at 7 pm. at Lopez Library, Lopez Island
  Book signing to follow.
• Thursday, October 13 at 7 pm. at SJIMA, 540 Spring Street, Friday Harbor-Gallery Talk and book signing to follow.
• Friday October 14 at 7 pm. at Episcopal Parish Hall, 242 Main Street, Eastsound, Orcas Island

For more information go to www.sjima.org. Hours are Friday – Monday 11 am to 5 pm, The exhibition is open from September 6 to November 28, 2016.

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