Becoming American: Louder in the Dark

Curators / Fionn Meade and SOIL

Minimal poetry by Aram Saroyan
Opening poem from Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems, (Ugly Duckling Press, NY) 2007

Iole Alessandrini, Nola Avienne, Colleen RJC Bratton, Jana Brevick, Christopher Buening, Emily Counts, John Freeman, Trevor Goosen, Bradly Gunn, Ben Hirschkoff, Philippe Hyojung Kim, Claire Johnson, Paul Komada, Margie Livingston, Marisa Manso, Nicholas Nyland, Peter Rand, Paula Rebsom, Aram Saroyan, Markel Uriu, Jono Vaughan, Ko Kirk Yamahira, Ellen Ziegler and Ilana Zweschi

September 06 – 30, 2018
Reception / Thursday, September 06, 6–8pm

Taking up a call-and-response exhibition format, Louder in the dark features works by SOIL members exploring themes from the concurrent group exhibition, Becoming American, while also including a particular emphasis upon participating artist Aram Saroyan’s groundbreaking “minimal” poetry.

With a selection of poems punctuating the wall space of the gallery, Saroyan’s work offers a frame to think through the larger exhibition and the complexity of our contemporary moment. Excerpted from a series of compositions written during 1964 – 72, a tumultuous yet highly experimental period in American art, culture and politics, the poems compress text into acts of visual concision, rupture, revision, lyrical seduction, refusal, meditation, laughter, and innovation that are just as fresh and provocative fifty years later.

Meant to be looked at as much as read, the poems are displaced and transposed from the page to take the conventional place of the image in the exhibition while artists’ works across medium will occupy the place of prototype, sketch, and model often associated with thinking through an idea or first draft. Assembled as a collective presentation of singular responses, a series of display tables sequenced within the gallery will present works that question, answer, and redirect what’s on view in the larger exhibition, including the poems that echo across the gallery walls.

Aram Saroyan is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright. He attended University of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University, but did not complete a degree. The son of writer William Saroyan, Aram Saroyan made his debut as a writer with six poems and a review of Robert Creeley’s novel The Island in the April 1964 issue of Poetry magazine. He became famous for his one-word or “minimal” poems, a form he developed during the early and mid-1960s, and which is often linked to Concrete Poetry. Saroyan is also frequently linked to Second Generation New York School Poets and conceptual art. Saroyan’s first books in this mode were Aram Saroyan (1968) and Pages (1969). His poem consisting of the single word “lighght” was selected by Robert Duncan for inclusion in the American Literary Anthology and received an award from the ten-new National Endowment of the Arts—for which it also received scorn and ridicule from conservative demagogues including Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan. His visual arts practice, although under recognized for most of his career, has recently been shown at Commonwealth and Co, Los Angeles and foregrounded at the 2016 L.A. Biennial, which was subtitled after one of Saroyan’s poems “a, the, though, only.”

Becoming American

Exploring how artists engage the ongoing challenges of American iconography, identity, history, and formal inheritances, Becoming American is an international group exhibition taking place on the historic grounds of the American and English camps on San Juan Island, WA, and across satellite venues in the city of Seattle.

Hosted in collaboration with the San Juan National Historic Park, the exhibition ranges from site-specific works responsive to the layered dynamics of the primary venue—including its history as the location of the Northwest Boundary Dispute between the United States and the United Kingdom, and the ecological reality of its current terrain—to works across medium that further examine the perhaps permanent, never-to-be-resolved nature of the larger understanding of the Americas. 

Featuring works that rehearse, analyze, and deconstruct the ideologies of American heritage rather than reiterate confrontational stances, the exhibition delves into themes of race, gender, place, and identity while maintaining a connection to the formal approaches embedded within the larger practice of participating artists. With our empathic cultural ethics now under greater threat than ever before, the show provides an opportunity to step into direct relations with the cultural imaginary of what it means to strive toward becoming American. 

Challenging the rhetorical demagoguery of our moment, the exhibition moves beyond constantly updated information, the flatness of visual compression and image production, and the atomizing nature of networked communication, to encourage an active looking on the part of visitors in both rural and urban contexts.

 Becoming American is a multi-venue exhibition taking place on San Juan Island and in the city of Seattle. Engaging the architecture and layered dynamics of the historic English and American Camps located in San Juan Island National Historic Park as its primary venue, the exhibition extends its inquiry and presentation into the urban context of Seattle, including a central group exhibition at Georgetown’s Studio e gallery, a solo presentation of Korakrit Arunanondchai hosted by Specialist, located in Pioneer Square, and a September show from members of the artist collective SOIL that responds to themes of the exhibition.

For more information on individual exhibitions, click here, or visit www.becomingamericanexhibition.com.