Cheryl Wassenaar and Brigid Dolan
The Other Side
December 12, 2009 - January 22, 2010
Poet Brigid Dolan and visual artist Cheryl Wassenaar collaborate for the first time on “The Other Side,” a poem about 2733 Arsenal, the hundred-year-old site of Cosign Projects, a former general store. Dolan responded to the building’s sense of past in a first person narrative, with words that carry us through the cycles of lives lived there. Wassenaar responds by arranging portions of the text on the windows of the building, the “eyes” of its soul.
A special thanks for Bianca Jackson for her assistance.
The Other Side
This is the story of a house that was once a store,
Brick and mortar, spirit and surrender.
Will you cross the street
To the other side?
Men and women have haunted my rooms,
Filling me with the light of their bodies,
The din of their souls.
In dark closets,
I nurse their secrets, watching them grow.
Each one a treasure.
Under the bed, behind the door,
All that they have lost
Will return in a new shape.
What is living, but to give over?
Under the clouds, the moon, the sun,
Play, work, rest, repeat.
Good heart, bad heart.
We are one in this collapse
Simply this:
Do no harm.
Cheryl Wassenaar in her studio in St. Louis, Missouri.
Photo by T. Dorrance
Cheryl Wassenaar
Cheryl Wassenaar is a visual artist who works with the function of language and text, exploring visual metaphors of speech, sound, and communication. She works primarily with found commercial signage, constructing paintings with fragments of text that are broken from rules of syntax. Although the source material often originates from the detritus of commerce and industry in her own neighborhood, Wassenaar finds inspiration in the ornamentation and constructive practices of artisans around the world, particularly those in southern United States, Eastern Europe, and Mexico. Wassenaar is currently Associate Professor in the College of Art at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri
See Cheryl Wassenaar's portfolio here. CV (pdf).
Brigid Dolan in her studio in St. Louis, Missouri.
BRIGID DOLAN
Brigid Dolan is a poet who finds much of her inspiration from the symbiotic relationship between people and their homes. As a repository of human emotions, a home bears witness to the emotional lives of its individual inhabitants and the interactions among family members, which can range from love to hate, compassion to aggression. Therefore, homes bear the indelible traces of its inhabitants in the same way that humans bear the traces of their homes and their families. The notion of home is at once universal and local, physical and spiritual, individual and social. The powerful role of home in the human imagination, as a point of departure and return, ensures that we will always be haunted by home. Dolan currently teaches English at Parkway South High School.
See Brigid Dolan's CV here (pdf).
