Deric Carner

Telefone Sem Fio

[EFA Project Space NYC]

"Lion of Sand/Potter of Gold" translates Augusto de Campos's "Diálogo a Dois" poem into a series of unique prints. The poem is a dialog between two poets who address one another as "the Lion of Sand" (Augusto) and "the Potter of Gold" (Pignatari). I began literally, by collecting commercial images of cement lions and gold jewelry. With this image bank, I generated a multi-page pdf document that centered one image per page and flowed the text through four quadrants. This "blind" system fragments the original text and mimes concrete poetry. Shown here are selections from this series, which have been further processed by wetting, folding and otherwise marring the clean print. Where the computer has shelled meaning through logic and chance, the hand reinserts a human investment in the resulting word pieces. My art practice is engaged with this relay between pristine or ideal forms—representing both utopian modernism and commercial rationality—and their frustration by actual lived experience. Augusto de Campos was working at time when it was transgressive to suggest the visual appearance of text could be as important as the conventional meaning of words. Today the commercial world is fully invested in typographic tactics of engagement. My "translation" takes this into consideration by deploying the kinks and marks of an anti-design aesthetic in order to render the elemental word-objects visible again.

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