Montreal Danse Collaboration: Furies
In conjunction with my retrospective exhibition, Field Notes, at Western Gallery in Bellingham, Washington, I was asked to work with Kathy Casey, Artistic Director of Montreal Danse, whose company was performingFuries Alpha 1/24 (The Monsters Within) in the gallery just prior to the opening of the show. We wanted to find a way of visually and conceptually integrating the performance with the works on exhibit. To this end, I altered existing photographic images in Photoshop to make large digital prints on tissue and kraft papers--"trash" that was installed in the entrance to the performance area and in the set, along with bones that I had collected over the years. Sarah Clark-Langager, Director of Western Gallery, states, ". . .Kornberg's photographs and Montreal Danses' performance resonate with order and chaos, move back and forth along the lines of control and lack of control, and flutter between despair and hope."
Poetic Dialogue Project: Arachne
Elisabeth Frost, Poet
Our project was to allude to the style and conventions of collection and preservation, which have occupied Dianne in her recent work and which dovetailed with Elisabeth’s interests in specialized language in poetry. We chose to work with webs as specimens, like those in a herbarium. We used photographed webs, hand-inked text, penciled notations, red-bordered labels, and a surface that ‘impersonates’ specimen paper with stains and imperfections. Likewise, the text reflects descriptive taxonomy that is part of a preserved specimen, including genus, species, measurements, and Latin terminology. With such tools we sought to represent a web as a suggestive trace – from the ‘ballooning’ that launches spiderlings into new habitats via their own silk threads [0001] to the web’s role in consumption of prey [0003] and conservation of energy, since webs also double as food [0004].
In crafting a work that explores text and image as integral to one another, we opted for diptychs in which each pairing creates multiple dialogues: between hand-writing as scientific notation and as poetic/lyric phrase; between hand-writing as trace (partially erased) and the web as visual/glyphic trace; and between scientific and lyric ways of understanding the phenomenon before us – including [in 0005], the myth of Arachne, whose acts of creation our work also honors.
Madonna Comix
Celia Bland, Poet
Poet, Celia Bland, contacted me after seeing Arachne at the Chicago Cultural Center. She sent me several unpublished poems titled “Captions for Cartoons Not Yet Drawn.” Included was a series of poems about the Madonna—Mary as a refugee, a bereaved mother—from which I selected text to use with imagery. In l996 I had made a series of 4 x 5” black and white negatives of a dancer who was seven months pregnant. I used these as the basis for this work. The underlying pages are erased Little Lulu comics with bits of text showing through the image. This pentimento text creates a secondary dialogue, in part, through chance occurrence.
The Virgin Birth, the physicality of motherhood, innocence and experience are all at play here. I felt that powerful imagery was necessary to attempt an equivalency between the poetic text and the images.
The Lore Which Nature Brings
Elisabeth Frost, Poet
In 'The Lore Which Nature Brings,' we contrast scientific and poetic ways of engaging birds' nests, specifically how do science and poetry represent oppositional ways of interpreting nests, and how might we bridge (or at least comment on) these representational modes? We contrast two tropes: specimen collection (engaging the nests as objects), and the highly subjective, sometimes sentimental, meditations and emotional projections that characterize much poetry about birds and their nests. We are after a fiction of artifacts – of specimen pages in which the collected object interacts with an over-determined poetic subject.
We wanted to de-sentimentalize cultural cliches about nests, from the iconography of maternal instinct and 'empty nest syndrome' to the trope of an anthropomorphic 'joyful' birdsong. Elisabeth subverts ideas about birds and nesting by mining Romantic poetry. The resulting text, primarily found language, represents acts of radical 'pruning' of famous lyric poems about birds, birdsong, and birth.
Our title comes from Wordsworth's 'The Tables Turned,' in which the speaker avers, 'Sweet is the lore which Nature brings,' decrying our human 'meddling intellect' ('we murder to dissect,' he states – from which we derive another title in the series). Rejecting not only science but also art (presumably including poetry), Wordsworth embraces direct emotional experience – and yet paradoxically writes a poem about it. That paradoxical artistic act is an analog for our project.
Riding the Crescent, 2010
Blood is Time
Blood Kin
Passing Strange
Celia Bland, Poet
This project began with Dianne's photographs of the blood from a slaughtered sheep collecting and coagulating in a tub, which she e-mailed to Celia. Celia responded with a story in which race, class and familial relations ride the Carolina Crescent, and ride contours of blood.
“Blood is Time” bears the distressed text of a young woman’s misadventures as she misses a train; “Blood Kin,” a climactic moment of familiarity and erasure in a Day’s Inn; and “Passing Strange”: riding the rails as she attempts to escape a past borne within, pulsing like blood. Here the scrawled lines of text mimic the vehicles of the girl’s travels -- corvette, taxi and train – veering along the byways of blood and race and sex. As one reads, piecing together the fragmented phrases overlaying bloodscape like a scrim over the killing floor, one might imagine much-read maps of intersecting routes. Blood remembrance underlies this collaboration of text and image, making even disjointed phrases and dead-ends redolent of a blood inheritance of taboos and prejudices. Blood, as the saying goes, always tells.
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