mOvement

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...