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A library exhibition by Rebecca Lawrence Lynch

March 2026

The world of contemporary poetry can at times appear ill at ease in its relationship with visual art. Although happy enough to sit alongside the work of photographers and other artists, if you were to open the majority of literary journals published in Canada, you would not be thought crazy if you came to the conclusion that a poem is most itself as a series of lines on a blank page.

 

A poet with no visual art practice to speak of, Rebecca Lawrence Lynch (Reedman) has been delighted to discover a long tradition of troubling this divide. This display presents texts selected from Artexte’s collection that explore the relationship between the written and the visual. It includes a range of approaches, from poetry zine as art object to works of asemic writing that challenge the presumption that a poem or text need carry any meaning at all.