mOvement

Left: Winter Song, No Words. (2026). Digital print. Right: Yesterday, 1:14pm. (2026). Digital print. To Wander, To Wonder Asemic writer Rosaire Appel’s recent hybrid photo-based works emerge from a wide range of material practices shaped by a long-evolving set of approaches and sensibilities. Reflecting on her background, Appel writes: “I am an ex-writer/visual artist working with interconnections among reading, looking and listening. The vehicles for my explorations are drawings (digital & analog) and books… including graphic novellas, abstract comics, asemic writing and asemic music.” This breadth is evident in the multifaceted methodology of these works, where the interplay of forms deepens their poetic resonance and articulates a layered sense of space—perceptual, experiential, and subtly socio-urban. While much of her earlier work operated within the space of writing, two recent works— Winter Song, No Words (2026) and Yesterday, 1:14pm (2026)—shift toward incisive photograp...

   I had to Close My Eyes . 2025. Typed text, carbon transfers. British visual poet, collagist, and author Robin Tomens has been “hard at it” for quite some time (evidently since the Punk era—visit his blog HERE ), and it shows in the typed vispo he frequently shares on social media. His work balances dense clouds of text and angular or serpentine typed lines against broad, organic smudges, with weathered surfaces bearing the trace of hand-drawn, carbon-transferred elements throughout. These textural and graphic components are often combined with images and bold, flag-like fields of colour. The typed elements—substantial arrays of non-semantic characters (letters and symbols)—are frequently juxtaposed with minimal, epigrammatic lines such as “ There’s just two kinds of people: my kind of people and assholes ” creating a sharp tension between improvised, stochastic patterning and aphoristic clarity. While Tomens’ work spans a wide spectrum of approaches, I’ve been particularly ...

  Left: Before the War. 2014 Right:  It Could Be Anywhere. 2017 BETWEEN WORDS & IMAGES While the focus of this blog has been on visual poetry, the recent work of Canadian artist Amy Friend has caused me to reconsider this. Her Dare Alla Luce series (which has pleasantly haunted me for some time) has always read to me like an image based form of poetry, so this post is a thought experiment of sorts. Dare Alla Luce (translated from Italian as Giving to the Light ) is a startlingly unique confluence of photography, drawing (with light!) and editing/curating. While these photographs are very much about memory and senescence, they are also a poetic form of meta-photography as seen in their self-reflexive nature. In this manner she establishes a dialogue or conversation with the long-gone unknown photographers (the artist's words here), one in which she uses the medium itself to interrogate its own history, material and nature. A deep rumination on time, the precious precar...

The Letter O . c. 2009 In 2009–2010, I was mesmerized by Judith Copithorne’s work during my graduate studies with Canadian poet Professor Gregory Betts. Greg (and his circle of remarkable colleagues) introduced me to a visual world I previously knew almost nothing about. It was a creatively life-changing experience, and I found myself hungrily chasing down both historical and then-current works. As an artist whose career has largely focused on drawing, I was naturally drawn to Judith’s early works, which feature a confluence of serpentine drawn and written elements. There was something “different” about her work—something that stood apart from much of what I was pursuing at the time—and I kept digging. Eventually, I encountered her 2009 work The Letter O . A later-career digital piece, The Letter O is unique within Copithorne’s canon, standing apart from both her earlier analogue works and her later digital output—almost a “one-off,” if you will. The serpentine linear elements present...

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...