RE_MOVE is an exhibition that physically embodies a digital transatlantic dialogue in image and text from 2019-2020 between visual artist Kasia Ozga and poet Dan Rosenberg. Ozga and Rosenberg did not communicate outside of sending their work back and forth, allowing this project to unfold within and between the media of its composition. Located in France, Ozga produced images using the batik process with materials reclaimed from multiple former and ongoing projects including handmade paper, architectural drawing templates, thread, found pigments, and mixed-media elements. Located in America, Rosenberg wrote poems that similarly expand this dialogue beyond the binary of correspondence by responding not just to Ozga’s images but to other writers whose work spoke to the moment, including Emily Dickinson, Tomaž Šalamun, Yehuda Amichai, William Blake, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Søren Kierkegaard. This dialogue progressed as neither ekphrasis nor illustration, but as a series of incitements that continued until they exhausted Ozga’s supply of repulped paper.
The exhibition is the first opportunity for the artists to work together on this project in person, bringing a digital conversation into a shared physical space. Ozga and Rosenberg selected works from their collaboration that offered the opportunity to reimagine their dialogue, exploring both the diaristic, iterative nature of the images as a series and the various potential embodiments of the poems in the gallery space. In addition to the images occupying the gallery walls and pedestals, the exhibition includes the sculptural use of fragrant hay pulp to center the physicality of the images and the process of hand papermaking. And in addition to poetry hanging on the walls, it is also affixed to windows, wrapped around pillars, printed on a giant scroll, presented in book form, and recited aloud (in a recording by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón from The Slowdown). Rosenberg and Ozga have even set one poem in metal type on a carbon proofing press so gallery visitors can print a copy of the poem to keep.
When designing the exhibition, the exploration of the diverse ways to render poems as physical objects in a gallery space led quickly to disassembling the poems’ bodies. RE_MOVE takes advantage of the fact that poems can be variously instantiated without losing their identities by utilizing the gallery space to weave poems through images, asking visitors to walk on vinyl-printed lines from poems on their way to examine images, and otherwise inviting visitors to inhabit and experience this dynamic conversation between visual and verbal art.
