The Poetics of Urban Space: The Asemic Writing of Rosaire Appel
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 photographic observation of urban and textual environments, combined with a distinctive range of asemic marks. These pieces reflect the eye of a keen urban observer. As Appel notes, walking is integral to her practice: “New York… is visually surreal and endlessly inspiring. I walk everywhere, camera phone in pocket”(1). Weathered surfaces place the viewer behind a window, while graffiti-like gestures and grimy textures also evoke sidewalks or curbs, lending the images a strong temporal charge.
The Poetics of Public Space
In Winter Song, No Words and Yesterday, 1:14pm, Appel combines asemic text (bordering on drawing) with collage processes that include image collection, photographic documentation, and digital mediation, layered onto surfaces such as acetate and paper. The resulting works—visibly worn by time and process—embody the materiality of urban space.
These bold graphic elements are deceptively simple. Operating at the boundary between writing and drawing, they generate a tension between reading and looking. Appel describes these elements as being "locked in conflict"(1), a destabilization that enlivens the work both textually and visually. A parallel tension between image and asemic text further intensifies this effect, producing a space that feels at once intimate and public.
This spatial dynamic recalls Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), which frames writing as inherently spatial and rooted in lived and imagined environments. Appel’s asemic practice extends this idea, privileging pre-linguistic, emotional, and imaginative space over fixed semantic meaning.
Up Close, Far Away
Beyond their visual appeal, what stands out is the works’ acute sense of place. In Winter Song, No Words, faint city contours emerge through a weather-smeared surface, framed by gridded lines suggesting architectural diagrams or a musical staff. Blurred passages and gestural marks overlay the scene, evoking both graffiti and musical notation. The work seems to hum with the imagined sounds of cold, wet streets.
If Winter Song, No Words positions the viewer indoors looking outward, Yesterday, 1:14pm turns inward and becomes more dramatic. A mediated photocopy of a newspaper fragment referencing the 2025 Bondi Beach Shooting anchors the composition, framed by artificial binder rings. Above it, a sky-like field holds sparse asemic figures and the glare of light on acetate. Black framing elements suggest windows or doorways, and the overall structure recalls the cabinet works of fellow New York artist Joseph Cornell.
Where Winter Song, No Words hums with the city, Yesterday, 1:14pm reads as an act of reading—accompanied by the quiet buzz of interior space. Though contrasting in orientation, the two works function together as a nuanced exploration of public, personal, psychological, and political space.
From, of the Street
Appel renders urban space as both wondrous and prosaic—a site where daily life and global events coexist. The streets she traverses feel ever-present, shaping a layered interplay of personal, local, and global experience. Her work portrays urban life as fragmented yet navigable, filtered through the residue of world affairs.
Buildings become witnesses; newspaper fragments serve as connective artifacts linking the individual to broader histories. In this way, Appel transforms ephemeral experience into a quiet chronicle, where world events register as traces embedded in the surfaces of the city. Appel’s offers a reflective account of how one artist navigates the intersection of personal and collective urban experience amid the constant flow of media and time. More significantly, her work renews a sense of wonder—revealing the city not only as a site of information and movement, but as a space of sustained attention and imaginative possibility.
In Parting
As with previous posts I am sharing an animated "reading" combining both of Rosaire's works discussed here. This is a humble attempt to commune with her work further given my inability to enjoy her work in person in New York City, something I hope to rectify someday.
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