mOvement

Primary Language . 2025 Sacha Archer's exploration of the materiality of language has pleasantly mystified and amused me for several years. His stamp pad works stage linguistic characters within an indeterminate visual field, where they exceed their semantic function and operate instead as shifting forms and surfaces. Reconfiguring text as a visual event, Archer foregrounds its potential to destabilize meaning while simultaneously inviting aesthetic play. Like Steve McCaffery’s Carnival series, Archer’s work favours a serpentine composition. However, where McCaffery's pieces feature map-like structures and legible words, the characters in Archer's works stand alone, fluidly tracing paths that suggest an organic movement akin to biological drift in illusory space. His poems often employ a free-form jumble, in contrast to the a subtle rectilinear scaffolding of McCaffery’s typewritten works. Words tumble, and through repeated forms he weaves structural webs that might best be...

Inverting the deer . 2010 Over the past eight years, my .gif(t)ing practice has engaged extensively with the visual poetics of Canadian author and poet Gary Barwin, whose work I have frequently translated into animated form. Describing Barwin’s work succinctly is difficult, as his imagination and creative approach are remarkably wide-ranging—moving deftly between the absurd, the lyrical, and the cosmic. Yet one constant to which I continually return is his enduring sense of wonder: an attentiveness to nature, the stars, the cosmos, and our shifting orientation as human beings within these vast networks. Inverting the Deer (from his collection The Porcupinity of the Stars, Coach House Books, 2010) exemplifies this sensibility. The work features a deer, drawn with naturalistic precision, yet crowned not with antlers but with constellations (one of which is Andromeda). The image stages a surreal and arresting metaphor: antlers as antennae, a terrestrial creature becoming a conduit be...

Fictional Bird Jazz.   2025. Canadian multi-disciplinary artist Gary Barwin engages fluidly across literary, visual, and sonic forms of expression, frequently integrating these modes with striking sophistication and conceptual depth. His recent time-based work Fictional Bird Jazz exemplifies this approach by presenting a video in which words, rendered as bird-like figures, traverse a black field in tandem with a languid jazz soundtrack that echoes their motions. As the textual-birds move through negative space, they fleetingly disclose fragments of an obscured underlying text, without ever revealing either the birds or the words in their entirety. The text is simultaneously legible and illegible, present and deferred as the avian word-forms wing through the darkness. Neither bird-forms or verbal content achieve full presence; instead, meaning here emerges in an obscure space between visibility and erasure reminding me of some of Cy Twombly's so-called blackboard works. The resulti...

An apparition is a dead poem which is believed to appear or  become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image . 2020. Unlike the works I've shared so far, this week's beguiling and haunting visual poem by Laura Kerr features an image-based strategy containing no text. Her piece (and the accompanying title/epigram) describes a poem as an ambiguous construct that appears in shape-shifting form. The elusive visual syntax of the image, unstable, surreal and contingent both intrigues and unsettles the reader/viewer. Featuring no entry or exit points it is a challenging and uncanny space in which mystery and alternate universes might abound. Like a hall of mirrors that is simultaneously (and strangely) full and empty, it feels like an empty space waiting for a story to arrive. The framed image of a bedroom within a bedroom (within yet another bedroom > ) is patrolled by a floating dot (masquerading as a period?) that traces its elongated rectangular pa...

Ben Mikuska. eFluent , 2018. View full-size animation   HERE . This weeks .gif blog-shot features an amazing work by the brilliant and wildly multi-talented Ben Mikuska (artist, bassist, building designer, art preparator extraordinaire etc.).  eFluent  suggests both the auditory and visual potential of language and features a confluence of sound and textual delights in a deep, dark glyph-scape populated by the letter  e .   A solitary e appears that quickly multiplies into a vast swarming field of eeees bubbling upwards in constant eruption, surging backwards and forwards to and from the viewer. A short-story or poem starring the letter e ?  eFluent  succeeds at being simultaneously playful and nightmarish. The soundtrack features music by St. Catharines-based improv noise/sound band TZT featuring: Gary Barwin ,  Gregory Betts , Devon Fornelli ,  Ben Mikuska ,  and myself. 

Hart Broudy, 2020. In my first blog/entry I said I'd be sharing existing works of visual poets whose texts I'd hijacked and .gif animated between 2017 and now. However, I recently had the pleasure of losing myself in  Dani Spinosa 's OO: Typewriter Poems , (published by Invisible Publishing ) and I fell for her amazing riff on Hart Broudy ... and so this week's post is fresh off the .gif-presses! I was intrigued by the premise of OO: , a project based in creative theft, it engages in an amazing conversation with work of the past, present and here, in this immediate moment, the future (which is oddly now already the present again right?). It is a lovely reminder of the fact that much cultural production is an ongoing conversation that in some ways has no end....how could I resist? If you'd like to view the animation in full-browser size please click   HERE .