1) Evan Gruzis
The essence of the simile is for me rooted in a kind of naiveté and risk, an innocence that rushes headlong into the impossible pivot of an association that impossibly arrives at something accurate—a pivot and an arrival that highlights the awesome possibility of relation itself. (Consider the poet Heather Tone’s inspiring simile work here.) With the simile, we experience at once the falling away and re-entangling of language, but we also see that we are seeing, we hear the “as” or the “like” and the dissimilarities they imply. We are reminded that our complicity in meaning’s production has been solicited and of how pleasurable that solicitation and seduction can be. A good simile feels delightful and effortless; it draws us under quickly, exposing the nothing behind saying and seeing only to briskly pivot and resituate us on new, rekindled ground. The artist Evan Gruzis creates work that solicits and seduces even as it lets us see our own seeing and seduction. Images in Gruzis’s work are both like “beauty” and beautiful; they’re both like “fun” and “sexy” and “noir” and are. Gruzis knows what it means to have a style, which can be both affirmative—the coordination of the differences of a life and world and of what they might become—and potentially ideological—the sinister work of taste (and its exclusions) that solicits and seduces.
Installation View Of Exotic Beta At The Hole Gallery, NYC 2011
Consider My Mind Blown No. 3, Ink On Paper, 2008
The Claudius App's selections represent a diversity of traditions and run the gamut from a slew of ferociously talented poets in their early twenties to poetryland’s most interesting eminences. A handful of my favorites from issues 1 and 2:
(Flesh) is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive.
–Jenny Saville
4) Isaiah Toothtaker's vimeo feed (NSFW)
Style, sensiblity, world-building, mayhem, Tucson.
A lineup that's not to be missed.