A library exhibition by Klara du Plessis and Kadie Salmon
April 14 - June 22, 2023 @ Artexte's reading room
Opening — Thursday, April 13, 2023 – 6 p.m. @ Artexte
Incipit. Scree. Explicit. is a sculptural artist’s book that employs poetry and photography as medium. Literally meaning “(here) begins” and “(here) ends” in Latin, Incipit and Explicit bracket the book with the language of early press culture, while also bleeding into connotations of erotic graphic language. The terms further unsettle themselves on the slope of loose stones called Scree. Formally, the written poems are sonnets, loosening their rhythmic and stanzaic strictures, but maintaining the traditional fourteen-line format and rhyming couplet. Paper, including print-outs of the poems and photographic documentation, is folded, cut, scrunched, moistened, and harnessed according to different weights and tactilities.
Klara du Plessis is a poet, scholar, and literary curator. Her debut translingual poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and her book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh, was adapted and produced as a mono-opera film and premiered at the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), 2023. Klara holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University. Her current interdisciplinary research focuses on twentieth century and contemporary Canadian poetry, and thinks critically about the often neglected labour that goes into shaping poetry reading series, whether live or in the audio archive.
Kadie Salmon is a Scottish artist based in London who uses analogue film to create hand painted photography, moving image, and sculpture. Salmon graduated with an MFA in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. She is represented by New Art Projects, London and has been exhibiting internationally for over a decade. Her awards include Arts Council England, European Cultural Fund, and The Henry Moore Foundation. She is currently working on her ongoing project Closing Bones (2020-present), supported by the Freelands Foundation and a_n artist bursary.