OH X SPIT: Publication Launch

Join us this Saturday, June 2nd between 2:00 - 4:00 PM for experimental readings, SSML text-to-speech listening, and the launch of the OH x SPIT publication. Refreshments will be served.


In a strategy to engage with artist-led writing and publishing from Los Angeles and Vancouver, Access Gallery invited SPIT to lead a series of experimental readings and events responding to the Office Hours’ publications and installation installed at Access Gallery’s PLOT throughout the month of May, 2018. On May 12 and 19, SPIT, together with Vancouver-based artist and poet Sonja Ratkay, led two intimate workshops designed to interpret the publications in the Office Hours omnibus in unexpected and experimental ways.

The workshops centered language as both image and sound; engaging the body through corporeal mark-making and unreadable writing; proposing image as text; and utilizing Text To Speech readings, synthesized voices, and sounding forms. From staining pages with fruit juices to formatting Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) code, this publication, and its accompanying audio components, contain traces of the idiosyncratic and personal interpretations of participants in these workshops. The original writings and images found in the Office Hours’ collection have been translated into something altogether different; their materials surviving in a cryptic new state.This unique Vancouver edition exists as a contribution to the Office Hours’ publication series, marking the closing of Office Hours’ tenure, as well as Brody Albert’s exhibition, Nonlocal, in the exhibition space.

VISUAL CONTRIBUTORS AND MAY 12 WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS:

Sonja Ratkay, Alex Grünenfelder, Cristina Holman, Emma Metcalfe Hurst, Simone Jarvis, Julia Wong, Christian Vistan, Kiel Torres, Weiyi Chang, Stefanie Bokenfohr, Daniel Nesseler, Liz Saunders, Heather Kai Smith, Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora, Esteban González, Danelle Ortiz, and Miguel Maravilla.

AURAL CONTRIBUTORS AND MAY 19 WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS:

Esteban González, Jules Francisco, Kiel Torres, Aubin Kwon, Miguel Maravilla, YiFan Jiang, Vanessa Grondin, Emma Metcalfe Hurst, Catherine de Montreuil, and Christian Vistan.
 

ABOUT/BIO's

SPIT is a series of reading experiments, workshops, interviews, events, and poetic expressions based in Vancouver, and organized by Emma Metcalfe Hurst and Christian Vistan. The online archive of their former self is located at www.lit-lit-lit-lit.com.


OFFICE HOURS is installed in Access Gallery's PLOT space for the duration of Brody Albert’s exhibition Nonlocal. Operated by Brody Albert and Nathaniel Klein, Office Hours is a nonprofit gallery and publisher initiated in 2013 in LA. Dedicated to the intersection of visual art and creative writing, their mission is to build an active dialogue between literary scenes and arts communities. After being forced out of their Arts District space in 2016, Office Hours took an itinerant position. Office Hours has mounted 9 exhibitions and produced 8 publications featuring the work of 30 LA artists and 19 writers.

Office Hours has brought an omnibus of their publications, a new video work titled Open Ocean by Klein, and a new publication made specifically for PLOT by Albert in collaboration with Rachel Paprocki, Miguel Espinoza and Michael Kennedy Costa.

SONJA RATKAY is an artist, poet and researcher. Through reliefs filled with poems, diagram drawings and immersive installations she researches topics of language and the body, forming of thoughts through known and unknown symbols, intuition, haunting and the haunted, states of being, and environmental triggers which lead to psychological transformation. She lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

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IMAGE: Unreadable writing by Sonja Ratkay; courtesy of the artist.