Claire Hero & Bari DeJaynes
Bari DeJaynes: My friends Farrah Field & Jared White created an on-going event titled "Yard Meter". It is a one night event that includes poetry readings, an art exhibit and sometimes performance pieces. They invited me to show my art, but asked if I would include in my show, a collaboration with the poets. I sent them a piece of my "art scraps" and I created a piece of art based on my impressions of their body of work. The poets brought with them to the Yard Meter event, the piece I had mailed them and it was displayed while they read their poem. The energy was fantastic at the event. I felt like I knew them, even though we had never met.
Claire Hero: When I received Bari’s thought-scrap, I went for a walk to think about it. What could the crow be tethered to? I looked up to find buzzards circling overhead, drawn by something on the ground, held aloft by heat. Whatever had drawn them would soon join them, would pass over the line that separates earth from sky, one body from another. In this collaborative process I was tethering Bari’s thought-scrap to my own, his obsessions to mine. I continued this process by building the poem out of my own thought-scraps, cutting lines and images into scraps I could then collage to build the body of the poem.
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Sky Burial
To be opened up. To be
open. Inside the am-hole
the small failures of mercy.
An albatross gorged on plastic.
An orange string entangled
in a crow’s talon, tethered
to what – pylon & mine, truckstop & trough.
Lines & holes & the means
to connect them. The sky in an eyeball.
Empty vessel.
A mouth can be casket enough.
The flesh between our teeth.
Bones ground with yak milk
& the hair discarded.
& soon the old world comes
slipping from its sky,
carrying our unbecoming
in its gullet.
Watch it rising
on our final heat, feeble
corruption of air, our last,
on which it turns, & waits.
To be so far from earth
is to be unmammaled, unmilked.
& the further up, the less –
flesh into hiss, bone into egg.
That hollow, yes. & either
a beginning or.
Sky up, small intestine,
& devour –
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Claire Hero is the author of Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press 2009) and two chapbooks: Cabinet (dancing girl press) and afterpastures, winner of the 2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. She lives in upstate New York.
Bari De
I approach my art without any plans or preconceived ideas, all the while listening for the quiet, fleeting, authentic voice within me. In this respect, I see my art as transient and naturally ambiguous.
Using both personal and historical art references as underpinnings, invented objects become symbols, symbols become icons and as the man-made mixes with organic forms, both the literal and more ambiguous dicotomies are explored.
Open for discussion.