This image list with prices is comprised of the 68 images in my solo exhibition of original poetry and fine art, “These Almost Lost Pieces” at Brassworks Gallery in Montclair, NJ, opening April 5th 2024 and going through mid-August. The exhibition space includes entire poems and fragments of poems installed alongside visual art. The exhibition is open 7am to 7pm when the building is open at 105 Grove Street, and by appointment in the evenings and on weekends: nancy.ring@verizon.net
“These Almost Lost Pieces” is a site-specific installation spanning decades of my artwork and including my original poems. It stands as homage to artists that are lifelong important inspirations to me both artistically and personally, and to the evolution of my own artistic self and love of the handmade. I first experienced an appreciation of the handmade from makers in my family, who knitted, tatted, crocheted, embroidered, baked and cooked, creating fine handmade objects that all bore the print of the maker.
The hallways of 105 Grove suggested to me the evolution of art making as metaphoric passages artists traverse, walking arm in arm with artistic role models we engage in conversation. Whether alive or long gone before us, these artists influence us on our way to our own “rooms.” Rooms where perhaps we develop our unique artistic voice for a week, a season or maybe more, leaving to roam the halls again when needed, returning to ourselves in our own time. Viewers encounter my work’s progression over time, my life’s movement through time, time told through the artists’ lives I include, and their own experience of time as they pass through the exhibition.
At the nexus of written and visual language, I unearth, reexamine and interrogate history to reimagine the biographies of the artists in my poems through a feminist lens. Including both women and men, fragments of the poems are presented between the artworks. The poems appear in their entirety at the end of the hallways.
The title poem, “These Almost Lost Pieces”, is about Vivian Maier, a photographer who died leaving behind thousands of undeveloped negatives, later discovered and developed, securing her place as one of the most renowned street photographers in the world.
My poem “Bird”, includes George Sand, a female writer who dressed as a man to move freely through Paris society and to publish. “Signs of Snow” includes still life painter Giorgio Morandi, whose reclusive behavior nevertheless afforded him the undying interest of the art world, and futurist Benedetta Cappa, a contemporary of Morandi who languished in obscurity more than once. In “Seventeen Claras” still life painter Clara Peeters appears, about whom almost nothing is known since the records of her personal history were lost while only her paintings survived.
“Intimast,” is an invented title I embrace because it so beautifully captures my passion for the vast contained in the small moment. I create visual poetry in the form of individual artworks meant to be read like lines of a poem, often alongside the text of my poetry. Each piece is unique, handmade objects that are in fact part of a series; the unifying thread being my hand, voice, and eye. Here, in these hallways, I offer the viewer my own small moments — of life, art, and the pursuit of visual poetics.
Nan Ring 2024