Been working on a collection of poems for release this year and decided to do the artwork myself (samples below). The concept came from the notion that art is like a collection of fragments—memory, imagination, anticipation—broken and reassembled.
There are two poems in the collection that are central to its whole—the title poem, “Unopened,” which centers on my father and pivots off an old LP I recovered, and “Thanksgiving Day,” which centers on my mother and pivots off some of her old glassware—candlewick. My idea was to take images representative of those poems, break them and put them back together, so they became, like memory, both real and imagined, both literal and abstract, shaped by process. Like found sound. Or life.
First, I took photographs of the album cover, printed those in various sizes, slicing and splicing the pieces on different colored backdrops, working through about a dozen iterations. Then I photographed two candlewick glasses and printed those images on transparency paper, in different sizes, smearing the ink as it came out of the printer, again about a dozen versions. Then I mixed and matched, laying the various transparencies over the various collages, scanning and manipulating those layered combinations again. So, in the end, the images were represented in full, but in pieces, like memory, art, or the poems in the collection.
Narrowed it down to the best “four,” and you’re welcome to shoot me a line if you want to vote for your favorite. More on the book to come. Thanks, Doug.
Doug Hoekstra 