Sara Greenberger Rafferty and Catherine Wagner in conversation
7:00 p.m.155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
$5 suggested donation
Cathy Wagner, “A Poem for ESPN (Nightwatchman),” Miss America (Fence Books, 2001). Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Alex, 2011, c-print, 24 x 18 inches, courtesy of Rachel Uffner Gallery.
Triple Canopy is pleased to present an evening of viewing and conversation with artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty and poet Catherine Wagner, focusing on the role of televised images, narrative, and sound as both source material for and counterpoint to the participants’ work. Rafferty and Wagner will watch TV in public, discussing video clips selected for the occasion alongside poems and prints. Triple Canopy editors Lucy Ives and Peter J. Russo will moderate and screen video in response to Rafferty and Wagner’s selections.
Re-contextualized by the economy of video and images online, television today is an uncannily constant stream of characters, catchphrases, assaults, and situations purveyed by “networks” of a different kind—a continuous, if strangely anachronistic, site for the creation and recreation of conventions for acting and image-making. Several steps removed from Time Warner, Rafferty’s images and Wagner’s lines glance at TV’s unsleeping animation. Much as Rafferty’s waterlogged stills represent a vernacular treatment of celebrity, Wagner’s poems channel the absorptive power of the set from the next room, by turns distorting, vernacularizing, and speaking in stranger, stronger affective terms. Join us for a dialogue about contemporary writing and artistic practice and the feeling of TV.
Re-contextualized by the economy of video and images online, television today is an uncannily constant stream of characters, catchphrases, assaults, and situations purveyed by “networks” of a different kind—a continuous, if strangely anachronistic, site for the creation and recreation of conventions for acting and image-making. Several steps removed from Time Warner, Rafferty’s images and Wagner’s lines glance at TV’s unsleeping animation. Much as Rafferty’s waterlogged stills represent a vernacular treatment of celebrity, Wagner’s poems channel the absorptive power of the set from the next room, by turns distorting, vernacularizing, and speaking in stranger, stronger affective terms. Join us for a dialogue about contemporary writing and artistic practice and the feeling of TV.
Participants
- Catherine Wagner teaches in the MA program in creative writing at Miami University and lives in Oxford, OH with her son Ambrose. She is the author of the book Nervous Device (City Lights Publishers, 2012).
- Sara Greenberger Rafferty is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist. In 2011, she had solo exhibitions at the Suburban, in Chicago, and at Rachel Uffner Gallery, in New York. Rafferty has also had solo exhibitions at the Kitchen and MoMA PS1, both in New York. She is an assistant professor of art at Hampshire College.
- Lucy Ives is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including The Hermit (2016), the novella nineties (2013), and, most recently, the novel Impossible Views of the World (2017, published by Penguin Press. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, Bomb, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, and Triple Canopy, where she was an editor for several years.
- Peter J. Russo is the former director for Triple Canopy and an independent consultant working in the fields of art and philanthropy.