8/26 Milwaukee Fringe Festival & Present Music present The Devil’s Abacus by Jessica Fenlon @ Vogel Hall in the Marcus Center for the Arts

5:45PM SUNDAY, part of the Milwaukee Fringe Festival…

Who is cast out? Who is confined? Is The Devil’s Abacus not actually the devil’s shoebox, where days are counted with razor blades and scratches marks, decompensating, trying anything to get out?

⚡️#TheDevilsAbacus ⚡️ #solitary ⚡️

Present Music Underground presents new work by local experimental music / performance artist Jessica Fenlon.

In recognition of the Nationwide Prison Strike from August 21 – September 9, we asked Jessica to focus on themes of confinement and resistance. Her response:

“In this work, I’m abstracting behaviors related to solitary confinement. Currently somewhere around 80,000 people in the American prison system are held in solitary confinement, as a method of controlling the behavior of all imprisoned persons.

As audience members, we want to think we have empathy, but we have deeply conditioned habits of turning away when we are directly confronted with the image of a stranger in pain. While working with ‘found media’, I omit documentary footage of persons held in solitary confinement. Instead, we will consider secondary evidence of their dehumanization, through the patterns of language applied to them, both inside that system and in the narrative ‘reporting’ on their situation.

Thus, we examine The Devil’s Abacus, a system of counting, holding, penalizing, and more counting . . .

There will be references to the traumatic self-harm this system encourages among the imprisoned.

I am employing a variety of cutup techniques to found media, and mixing it with created content using generative computer approaches, i.e. creating a systemic consideration of the evidence of the behaviors that re-inscribe the system of imprisonment.

It will be disorienting, slow, atmospheric, dark, and surprising. The media content? Projected light and sound sculpture, live instrumental performance, and audience participation.

I hope to see you there!”

Books of 2017

Here they all are, albeit blurrier than IRL. Available wherever they are sold (the authors, your local bookmonger or library, an evil, horrifying corporate leviathan, etc.). The ones I edited & laid out all have “man” in the title & the ones Mark Spitzer did all have “ar” & “la”.

Here they are again, in order of release, w/ better pics:

Thanks for reading & see ya next year!

12/16 Holiday Book Sale Redux @ Irma Freeman Center for Imagination

12-5PM SATURDAY…

Join us for a SECOND CHANCE to browse great books from Pittsburgh authors, publishers, and booksellers.

SATURDAY, December 16th
12-5pm
Irma Freeman Center for the Imagination
5006 Penn Avenue
Penn Avenue Arts District
Free admission
Street parking

Confirmed vendors so far:

Air & Nothingness Press
Hyacinth Girl Press
Lilliput Review
Karen’s Book Row–with many books from Pittsburgh publishers!
Six Gallery Press
Very Important Books–fiction & zines
Authors signing books!

I’ll be sharing a table w/ Don Wentworth at this, so visit us for all your Six Gallery Press & Lilliput Review needs. Pictured are Manual for Wayward Angels by Jessica Fenlon, the Low Ghost love poem anthology Unconditional Surrender, & Muskrat Friday Dinner by Scott Silsbe, three great books from 2017 (I’ve at least skimmed the other ones & strongly suspect they’re also pretty good). The latest Six Gallery titles Viva Arletty! by Mark Spitzer & Arkansas Ghoulash by Scotty Lewis, Manchild by Alan Olifson, & Under the Kaufmann’s Clock by Angele Ellis w/ photos by Rebecca Clever, will be available too, along w/ selections from the back catalog by Ally Malinenko, Chuck Kinder, Elwin Cotman, Jason Baldinger, John Grochalski, Victor Navarro, book sale organizer Karen Lillis, & more.

2/16 Manual for Wayward Angels launch @ Nine Stories

7PM THIS THURSDAY…

Poetry reading to launch Manual for Wayward Angels, Jessica Fenlon’s second book of poetry on Pittsburgh’s Six Gallery Press.

[ 2/15 heartbreak ] Hello lovelies! I am too sick to travel but I do believe the rest of the show will happen without me! And with Nathan, the editor extraordinaire helming 6 Gallery Press, reading as well. ♥ I miss you terribly, was so looking forward to this trip. But – the show goes on!!! In my stead! ~ Jessica Fenlon

New media artist JESSICA FENLON calls Milwaukee, Wisconsin home. In her digital art, Ms. Fenlon often glitches or breaks images in her ongoing exploration of public memory, semiotic reference, and epistemology. In her poetry, she constructs narratives from distilled memory and everyday life in our spectacular, our panopticon.

JEN ASHBURN is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Light on the Wall (Main Street Rag, 2016). She has work published in Chiron Review, Grey Sparrow, The MacGuffin, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Whiskey Island and other journals. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Chatham University, where she taught creative writing to inmates in the Allegheny County Jail through Chatham’s Words Without Walls program. Originally from southern Indiana, she spent four years in Japan and greater Asia, and now lives in Pittsburgh.

ANGELE ELLIS is author of UNDER THE KAUFMANN’s CLOCK (Six Gallery Press), a hybrid collection of poetry and flash fiction with photographs by Rebecca Clever, SPARED (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook), and ARAB ON RADAR (Six Gallery), whose poems won an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She lives in Friendship, where she sometimes sees the wings of former neighbors like Jessica Fenlon flashing in the skies.

KRISTOFER COLLINS is the books editor for Pittsburgh Magazine. He is the publisher of Low Ghost Press and co-director of The Bridge Series. He lives in Stanton Heights with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their two cats.

HANK MORRIS is a bum from way back. His poetry collection Anything Helps is forthcoming from Six Gallery Press.

Meet Angele Ellis Under the Kaufmann’s Clock…

…and she will show you everything Pittsburgh—from Schenley Park Golf Course at midnight and an artists’ colony in Oakland to sunflowers growing in sandy Garfield dirt, the neon sign of a Carrick tanning salon, and Grandma Berta’s Polish Natrona—city landmarks and personal landscapes where love is lost and lives implode like Three Rivers Stadium. In Ellis’s book of poetry and prose, with evocative photographs by Rebecca Clever, is a beloved timepiece and a poet’s sure hand that strikes memory.

—Paola Corso, The Laundress Catches Her Breath and Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories

This nifty new collab is coming in early 2017. Here’s the cover

& this poem from the Winter section

Polder
I wake with snow in my mouth and a word: polder.
All this time, I’ve been holding back the dike with one finger.
And still the sea keeps sending seeded storm clouds
to flood my land. In my dream, I was under the covers
with you. We were living in an artists’ colony in Oakland
summer. I was fitting the pieces together, a collage—
Audubon’s bird portfolio—but you kept putting
your hands under my shirt and saying, Come to bed.

It seemed as real as anything—the train whistle hooting
through stone-cold pillows, the mantle of white fur
I sweep from my sill, the sheeted illusion of love.

& another blurb.

Angele’s writing pulls me back to Pittsburgh and its nesting boxes of past-in-present. Organized by seasons, her poems and flash fiction hold the paradoxes of stillness against the constant evaporation of the present moment. Intimate texts are laced with the kind of detail that make fiction ring true. Ellis knows too how omission makes powerful poems of suicide, of violence and its consequences, of sex in the ‘ordinary life’. Side doors of dream unexpectedly slip open in Under the Kaufmann’s Clock. Let this work haunt you!

—Jessica Fenlon, Spiritual Side Effects

Fenlon, I should fully disclose, also has a book coming out in 2017—a glitched-out poetry collection called Manual for Wayward Angels.

Happy New Year & stay tuned for launch details!

2/13 UNLOADED feat. ungun @ Space Gallery

TONIGHT…

UNLOADED includes the sculpture Cross for the Unforgiven by Mel Chin that configures eight AK-47s as a Maltese cross. Frozen in perpetual opposition, they are rendered dysfunctional, unable to exact a drop of blood. With ironic sentimentality, the assemblage Baby’s First Gun by Renee Stout commemorates a developmental milestone, while James Duesing’s Dog-a projected video of a hot dog holding a gun-offers a wry rendition of machismo. For the Homeland series, Nina Berman travelled the country photographing military weapons displays, SWAT team training, and drills designed to prepare for hypothetical terrorist attacks, in order to portray the evolution of the “American security state.” Resistance to the power of guns is embodied in Vanessa German’s sculptures, signs, and spoken word performances and in Jessica Fenlon’s ungun, a video composed of degrading glitched images of instruments of violence.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwart/article/The-Pittsburgh-Cultural-Trust-Presents-New-Exhibition-UNLOADED-213-426-20150116

Ungun Giveaway

Jessica Fenlon is giving away a print of her most popular ungun (& possibly others if enough people sign up). Click.

 

 

3/27 Best of Sync’d @ Melwood Screening Room

TOMORROW, in addition to the Lummox Press reading, this is happening.

Via City Paper:

Sync’d is a unique cinematic venture pairing silent shorts by local filmmakers with original soundtracks performed live. If you haven’t been, tonight’s a good time to catch up: The Best of Sync’d features 10 films drawn from the last five shows. Shorts by the likes of Tess Allard, Jessica Fenlon, Michael Maraden and Jim Mueller are screened to recorded-live soundtracks by artists like Lungs Face Feet, Ben Opie and Josh Wulff, and Dire Wolves. Gangwish will perform live at the Melwood Screening Room event. Bill O’Driscoll 8 p.m. 477 Melwood Ave., Oakland. $5. 412-681-5449 or www.pittsburgharts.org

The Rapid Eye

Tait McKenzie Johnson & co. have put together this rad-looking new dream-themed publication.  The first issue includes fiction by Dean Clayton Edwards, Melissa Davis, Angele Ellis, Jessie Woods, Steve Carter & Frank Roger; poetry by Steve Klepetar, Jessica Fenlon, William Doreski, Crystal Hoffman, Ron. Lavalette, Jeena Mary Chacko, Valentina Cano, Denny E. Marshall, J.J. Steinfeld & Paolo Tedeschi; & images by Christopher Woods, Alberto J. Almarza, James Curcio & Pete Petrisko. Click on the above image to check out some examples of the content &/or buy a PDF of the thing for $3. If you’re reading this in a dream (which you are), make sure to write it down so you don’t go on about your day with a vague sense there was something important you wanted to remember, but no way to tell what it was, then submit what you wrote for the next issue.