<legend> </legend> | CARLA GANNIS & JUSTIN PETROPOULOS
FRI 04.18.14 @ 7:00PM
CARLA GANNIS is an artist who lives and works IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. GANNIS’S work examines the narrativity of 21st century representational technologies and questions the hybrid nature of identity, where virtual and real embodiments of self diverge and intersect. she has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. her work has been featured or reviewed in The HUFFINGTON POST, WIRED, ART F CITY, HYPERALLERGIC, THE WALLSTREET JOURNAL, & THE NEW YORK TIMES, among others. most recently she collaborated with poet JUSTIN PETROPOULOS on a transmedia book, installation and net art project entitled (JADED IBIS PRESS AND TRANSFER GALLERY, 2013). she is faculty and assistant chair of the department of digital arts at PRATT INSTITUTE.
JUSTIN PETROPOULOS is the author of two collections of poetry, EMINENT DOMAIN (MARSH HAWK PRESS 2011), selected by ANNE WALDMAN for the 2010 MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE and (JADED IBISPRESS 2013), a collaborative work with multimedia artist, CARLA GANNIS. his poems have appeared in AMERICAN LETTERS & COMMENTARY, BORDERLANDS: TEXAS POETRY REVIEW, COLUMBIA POETRY REVIEW, CRAB CREEK REVIEW, GULF COAST, MANDORLA, PORTLAND REVIEW and SPINNING JENNY. he is a contributing editor focused on digital, interactive and collaborative literature for ENTROPY. JUSTIN received an MFA in creative writing from INDIANA UNIVERSITY. he is currently the site director of an after-school program for elementary age children and is an adjunct faculty member at NEW JERSEY CITY UNIVERSITY, where he teaches composition and creative writing.
<legend> </legend> is a collaborative project of poems and drawings based on text redactions of THE BOOK of EARTHS, by EDNA KENTON, a compendium of theories of the shape of the EARTH, and its surrounding folklore. while the project is rooted in analog works, specifically poems by JUSTIN PETROPOULOS and ink drawings by CARLA GANNIS, it grows these texts and images into digital paintings, animations, projection mapped & 3D printed sculptures, as well as interactive works. the project’s title, <legend> </legend>, is an empty html tag. the viewer/reader must complete the meaning themselves, the definition of each legend is determined by the movement within ones own cartographies.
the goal of the project is to explore the ways people communicate, document, and map, moments from the past or in the present, and the relationships that are created in and by the various media used to those ends. we locate everything we experience, in the present or as memory, in a place, and those experiences because they are subject to the whims of subjectivity, are personal, and so too a kind of myth.
this iteration of <legend> </legend> will include a site specific installation of video works projection-mapped to discrete objects the artists find in the gallery as part of DEFIBRILLATOR’S RUMMAGE SALE to benefit the RAPID PULSE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART FESTIVAL. JUSTIN PETROPOULOS will read poems from the collaboration and CARLA GANNIS will create a digital drawing live in response to reading, which will be projected into the gallery space.
