Current Issue: # 50

Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

is an annual publication that features the very best in poetry,

fiction, nonfiction, and art. We were founded in 1977

and continue to be one of the few national literary journals

entirely edited, designed, and produced by students. Our 50th anniversary issue features:

Fiction

Danielle Evans, Travel Tips for Young Women;
Lydia Conklin, For A Future Person, Horse Time, The Great Bonfire;
Benjamin Buchholz, Third Tourniquet;
Joselyn Whitney Takacs, A Form of Waiting

Nonfiction

Antonia Blair, Feral Children;
Scott Anderson, The Hotel;
Honor Moore, Rowboat;
Oliver Bullough, Foreign Woman;
Julia Grønnevet, The Interstitial Space;
Alison Barker, Stepping-stones: Mamaw;
Lucas Mann, Fat Man: A Day in Calories

Poetry

Robert Ostrom, A Boy Cupping a Cricket Turns to Us and Says;
L. S. Klatt, Intrepid Pilot;
John Koethe, 1135, Arthur, The Specious Present;
Andrew Osborn, The Etymology of Anguish, On Beyondness;
Melissa Range, Negative Theology, Ashburnham;
John A Nieves, Elegy on an Epigraph;
Morri Creech, Heirloom: Nazi S.S. Cigarette Lighter, The Stone Well at Mt. Pisgah Church;
Kirstin Hotelling Zona, Return, Fog;
Peter Campion, Danielle, Villa Sciarra: Azaleas;
Kimberly Grey, Invention;
Gale Marie Thompson, Sigourney Weaver

Interviews

Emily Firetog, Interview with Roddy Doyle;
Megan Foley, Interview with Stephen Elliot

Art

Barbara Probst, Exposure #39: N.Y.C., 545 8th Avenue, 03.23.06, 1:17 p.m.;
John Stezaker, Mask LXXVIII 2007;
Sarah Charlesworth, Verbs, Nouns;
Renée Green, Exhibition invite;
Jenny Holzer, Left Hand (Palm Rolled);
Cyprien Gaillard, Indian Palm Study II, Indian Palm Study II (detail);
Adam McEwen, Untitled (Bret)ars;
Claire Jamieson, Eternally Yours

2. One Year / One issue of our annual journal for just $9.75

Details:

May 1, 2012, 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm

Pianos Bar

158 Ludlow Street (corner of Stanton), NYC

Readings from Donald Antrim – Seth Fried – Robert Ostrom – Kimberly Grey – Scott Anderson – Alison Barker

DJ: James Yeh

Gale Marie Thompson’s poem, “Sigourney Weaver” was selected by Eileen Myles as the winner of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art’s 2012 Poetry Contest. “I have so much optimism / that when I look around me I squint. / All I want is for someone to let me love them, all of them,” she writes. Thompson lives in Northampton, MA. Her first collection, Soldier On, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She has work in the Denver Quarterly, Bateau, Salt Hill, Volt, and elsewhere. She is assistant editor at jubilat.

From our Nonfiction Editor, Tara FitzGerald:

Anne Fadiman, the award-winning writer, essayist, editor and author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, served as judge for the Journal’s 2012 nonfiction contest, and selected a raw and compelling essay by Lucas Mann as this year’s winner. Fat Man: A Day in Calories addresses fatness, food and family with equal measures of self-deprecating humor and stomach-churning intensity. “The fat male characters are around you still. Falstaff, Costanza, Homer Simpson, late Orson Welles roles, all of them — giggling, slapping their stomachs and reminding you that they, you, are not heroes.” Mann is completing his MFA in nonfiction at the University of Iowa and his first book, tentatively titled Class A, is forthcoming from Knopf in early 2013.

From our Fiction Editor, Zinzi Clemmons:

Joselyn Takacs’ “A Form of Waiting” was selected as the 2012 winner in fiction by judge Dinaw Mengestu. The haunting story follows Allison, a newly-married musician living in rural Georgia on the day her house is invaded by two mysterious strangers. Each moment of this story is charged with danger, dread and surprising thoughtfulness, as she waits for the two men to decide her fate. In the pivotal scene, the narrative reflects on her life in the unfamiliar countryside and realizes, “her new life is just a form of waiting.” Takacs is pursuing her MFA at John Hopkins University, and will soon see her first major publication in Narrative Magazine. We’re honored to feature a story by this talented writer at the beginning of what appears to be a promising career.

In celebration of finishing our proofs of Issue 50, COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL is giving away TWO TICKETS to Kathryn Harrison and Lionel Shriver reading on Monday night at 92nd Street Y in New York.

Just tell us something about your favorite piece published by COLUMBIA in the past 50 years by writing on our facebook page. We’ll select a winner on Sunday.

http://www.92y.org/Uptown/Event/Kathryn-Harrison-and-Lionel-Sh.aspx

Each year Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center presents an eclectic mix of films they term, among other things, “the rare and the rediscovered.” Two noteworthy films at the festival this year were literary adaptations, remarkable for the gusto with which they handled the original texts.

Faust, by Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov, belongs to the “rare” category, since it may not easily find an American distributor. The film won the Golden Lion award in the 2011 Venice Film Festival. Sokurov is famous for his long takes. His Russian Arc, filmed in a single shot, was a piece of supreme fluidity. He is less interested in plot than in drawing our attention to how time unfolds. Mother & Son, for example, was a quiet meditation on the last day in a woman’s life, exploring the textual, ritualistic richness of minute moments.

Sokurov bases Faust on the famous text by Wolfgang von Goethe. The film is both a continuation and a departure for Sokurov. Visually it contains key elements of Sokurov’s art; for example the film features distortions (an entire image leans one way), to emphasize the subjectivity of looking. The blurring of shots adds a sense of emotional vertigo. Faust, however, unlike Sokurov’s other films, has a clear narrative thrust, in the form of the story of Faust’s sensual infatuation with young Margarethe.

Sokurov has put his own spin on the material: Mephistopheles becomes a lascivious pawnbroker, possessed of mysterious powers. Sokurov delivers a Faust we can relate to; he renounces religion in the name of science, but finds his pursuit of knowledge only increases his sense of alienation and disenchantment.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, based on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name belongs to the “rediscovered” category. Made in 1978, the film has rarely been screened. A ruined chocolate manufacturer decides to fake his own murder to collect insurance money. The tension in the novel and in the screen version hinges on the choice Hermann Karlovich (Hermann Hermann, as he calls himself), makes when choosing his double to kill; a man who bears no resemblance to him.

Similarly to Sokurov’s work on Faust, Fassbinder contextualizes the novel he is working with. In the novel, Nabokov names the year as 1930, but his style conveys a sense of timelessness. Fassbinder chooses to accentuate the epoch’s political events, adding the presence of the Nazi Brown Shirts, symbols of swastika, degenerate art, and scenes in which Jewish stores are vandalized. By bringing history to the forefront, Fassbinder ties the story of Hermann’s unraveling to Nazi Germany, setting Hermann’s paranoia against the growing surveillance of the state.

Like Sokurov, Fassbinder succeeds in making an engaging and moving film by staying close to his character. Hermann catches himself losing his mind. He watches himself making love to his wife; he suffers from delusions, seeing the same objects and people incongruously in two places. As in any great Nabokovian puzzle, Hermann is trapped, like a character in a play who keeps walking onto the wrong set. He moves from murdering his unlikely doppelganger, believing himself to be in complete control, to becoming trapped in his own lies and usurped personas.

Dirk Bogarde is brilliant in the role of Hermann—his progression from a cool, jeering sophisticate to an unhinged wreck is chilling. Fassbinder’s high farce even spoofs Nabokov himself via Hermann’s Russian background and gentility, and his dexterity with words and morbid humor.

In the end, both films invent a unique visual language to make literary characters come alive on the screen. They masterfully convey the claustrophobic reverie of dreams via their main theme, the workings of a human mind.

Canadian artist Shawn Kuruneru’s beautiful, intricate drawings have just been compiled into Women (a 38 page book, laser printed and perfect bound, published by Bsviv, Canada). Shawn’s work recently featured at the Drawing Center in New York, Battat Contemporary in Montreal and Night Gallery in Los Angles. He is currently working on a solo show at Ribordy Contemporary in Switzerland and Blackston Gallery in New York. Last year his drawings were acquired by the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum.

Amongst all these amazing shows, Shawn found time to share his thoughts on his new book, ballpoint pens, and Patrice O’Neal….

Congratulations on your new book! One of my favourite drawings is “The Sleeper.” What inspired this image? How does it fit with your more abstract drawings in the book?

The Sleeper is based on a 1950′s black and white photograph by Robert Frank from his series The Americans. I came across the photo by chance in a book store and at the time I was thinking a lot about figuration and colour. The dark mood of the image reminded me of my body of work I did during University in Montreal, Quebec in 2006. I wanted to explore certain surreal inclinations I had in the past with things in my immediate present.

I have drawn ‘The Sleeper’ a couple of times now, each one is a bit different in shape and size. The title changes because the ideas and images evolve. One of the new titles is ‘The Waiting Room’. I think of the figures waiting in anticipation for something unknown and now instead of sleeping they’re resting up to get ready for the shape of things to come. In a way this is my experience as a young emerging artist.

My abstract works are my way of boiling down drawing to understand its core. To me drawing is about origins. When you have an idea in your head you extract it by writing, sketching and scribbling it out. The first mark making gesture comes from  uncertainty and chance which is what I find most interesting and exciting in all art.
I use dot marks in the abstract works because it is the most basic form of mark making. When you have a group of dots you can connect them and find your own images and shapes.  The dot drawing series is entitled Virgin as way to discuss something new and unexplored while also insinuating a body-centric aspect to the work. The dot drawings have a reflective quality in them allowing each viewer to have their own personal experience. The figurative works would not exist without dots first.

How do the pictures in Women explore identity? It seems to be a theme that you’re coming at from different angles, with images of people, sculptures, and more abstract shapes?

I’m interested in concepts of self -identity that we look for in other people, ideas and art. I was thinking about origins a lot with my dot drawings and those ideas transmuted into my figurative works.  The first image in my book was inspired by Gustave Courbet’s 1887 painting The Origin of the World. The following pages are abstract drawings comprised of repetitive sweeping gestures that create an abstract cone-like shape which resembles a sonogram. The concept is that the sonogram image was my first portrait and since the late 1950′s for many people this is their first portrait as well.

The figurative images come from my formative years of drawing comics, listening to doo-wop and punk music, looking at art and thinking about women. There are a lot of things that I took from my teenage years that continue to influence me and this book functions as a a gateway into those thoughts and ideas. It’s my way to explore and understand identity.

What drew you to ballpoint pens, pencils and ink? Have you worked with other materials before?

I have been using ballpoint pen since I was a teenager from writing in notebooks to drawing on the bus. It has become my notion of textuality. The pen is a proletariat tool that has an intense ritual energy of communicating. We use pens everyday to write down ideas and to identify ourselves like when you sign your name on a letter. To me art is when you take two things with little value, a piece of paper and a pen, and you make a mark on it and it becomes something more then its intrinsic value. It becomes something special.

Does Women represent a new creative direction for you, or is it the culmination of themes?  Have other artists influenced your aesthetic?

The book is a new creative direction and a culmination of themes. The drawings span from 2007 to 2011.

I enjoy drawing and I tend to work intuitively. All of the drawings in the book were done in different places and time so each hold a certain history about myself.  I work instinctively so the themes and patterns  come after the fact.  I find that the excitement to make something is lost if you over think it and take too long.

There are a lot of artists that have influenced me and I reference some of them in the book. The cover is based on a 1900 sculpture by Auguste Rodin. I remember seeing photos of the sculpture in books and all the documentation was different depending on the lighting and angle. When I actually saw the sculpture in real life it was a whole different experience. It felt like an entirely different sculpture. I guess I was trying to contribute my own reinterpretation of the sculpture and how it continues to affect me. There are also references to films by Orson Wells, photos by Diane Arbus, G. P. Fieret and Man Ray, and musicians like The Ronettes, Elvis, and the fictional band The Fabulous Stains.

What’s it like starting a career in visual arts in NYC? Dead easy, right?

I imagine starting a career in the visual arts anywhere would be difficult.
It can be a lonely game when you strive towards a dream. This path is like a leap of faith. So I’m working towards my own ideas of what it means to be established.
But it’s also about having your beliefs and trying to build it into a life. The comedian Patrice O’Neal said it best: “I’m trying to be righteous.”

contact: shawnkuruneru@hotmail.com

Image courtesy of Lincoln Center Film Society, “Autumn Almanac.”

The complete retrospective of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (at the Lincoln Center Film Society from February 3-8) brought together all of his films, including the rarely seen Macbeth. The showings provided a unique opportunity to track Tarr’s artistic development.

Tarr’s work is usually classified as “socialist-realist” (his earlier films) or “modernist” (his later work). The two are presented as stark opposites. Tarr rejects this classification but it makes sense, on some level. In the socialist-realist vein, films like The Family Nest, The Outsider, and The Prefab People focus on the lives of young couples battling the harsh realities of communist Hungary. These films dissect how the shortcomings of a political system impact families, and introduce Tarr’s fatalistic vision of relationships. To quote from The Outsider: “The family life, a hearth of discord.”

Tarr began changing approach with his 1982 adaptation of Macbeth. The film introduced his interest in new themes such as power, manipulation, and female sexuality. Macbeth was shot in two continuous takes, mostly in close-ups. The resulting film did not deliver great Shakespearean performances but was remarkable for its intimacy.

In Autumn Almanac, Tarr’s cinematography moved further away from a deadpan, realist, documentary-style to a stylized Bergmanesque color palette with dramatic light effects. Confining the set to the interior of a rundown manor, Tarr staged a nuanced, claustrophobic drama of familial intrigue and boiling passions. At the center of the story is Heidi, an ailing heiress, who confines in a destitute alcoholic teacher. When Heide’s nurse seduces the teacher, she sets in motion a series of psychological manipulations and unexpected reversals.

Autumn Almanac marked Tarr’s abandonment of socialist apartment settings in favor of remote landscapes. Post Autumn Almanac, Tarr’s films universally feature ample use of outdoor space. Nature becomes its own character; the weather shown in destructive glory, with long shots of torrential downpours and gusty winds. There is a sense of timelessness. The small towns and the crumbling manors in Autumn Almanac, Werckmeister Harmonies and Sátántangó seem almost feudal.

Tarr began collaborating with Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai in his film Damnation, which perfects the theme already present in Macbeth and Autumn Almanac; masks, or social, deceitful, roles. Damnation also marked Tarr’s return to black-and-white film. The protagonist, Karrer, vies for the heart of a married cabaret singer, while engaging her husband to smuggle a mysterious package. Karrer’s monologues show him as a character of infinite complexity; his nihilism and philosophical bent borrow from Shakespeare, Beckett, and Dostoevsky.

Tarr’s masterpiece, Sátántangó, is in some ways a culmination of his artistic journey. The film builds upon Damnation by depicting farm inhabitants ruled by apathy, lechery and mistrust, who waste their time on drunken festivities. Two men presumed dead, Irimiás and Petrina, are returning home. Their promise to restore order has biblical overtones. In reality, the two men have been hired by the police as spies. With lofty speeches Irimiás, the false prophet, persuades the farmers to give up their savings, and to abandon their homes, in order to build a new utopian community.

Stunningly filmed in black-and-white, with long panning shots and an epic length (over seven hours), Sátántangó is a powerful commentary on utopian thinking—from Christianity to socialism. It also famously includes a scene in which an unloved girl-child wrestles with a cat and forces it to drink milk laced with rat poison, before committing suicide. The film explores the human capacity for evil and delusion.

Watching Tarr’s films it becomes clear that his midcareer shift towards modernism allowed him to confront the disheartening realities of communism symbolically. This shift may have been originally driven by political restrictions, however it seems to have also altered Tarr’s vision of the world and his characters. As Tarr put it in his interview with Indie Wire: “I began to understand that the problems were not only social [or] ontological … They were cosmic.” As Tarr evolves as an artist, his characters become stripped of sociopolitical realities. His evolution seems to help him explore the universal qualities residing in all of us, ultimately developing his own form of humanism—bracing and without illusions.

The super-talented Ellis Avery is the author of The Teahouse Fire, (Riverhead 2006), which won three awards and was translated into five languages, and The Smoke Week (Gival Press 2003) an award-winning personal account of life in lower Manhattan after 9/11. Her critically acclaimed new novel The Last Nude, centering on the relationship between Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and her muse, Rafaela, was released in January this year. Before her reading from The Last Nude last week at KGB bar, Ellis and I sat down to chat about Paris, artistic ambition, historical fiction, and painting classes with naked models.

Congratulations on the release of The Last Nude! There’s a big tradition of Americans going off to Paris and writing there; I’m thinking of writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Earnest Hemmingway. Do you think Paris still holds a certain fascination for American writers, and if so, why?

Paris was the epicenter of Anglophone modernist literature in the twenties and thirties.  Americans went there and it set them on fire. Paris has always been a small, dense city, and the idea of being there when you could have just happened to run into pioneers in literature, art, music, dance, and fashion must have been incredibly seductive.

I first encountered world of Anglophone Jazz Age literary Paris when I was 16, very close in age to my narrator, Rafaela, the young woman who modeled for the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka’s most famous works. I lived in Paris the summer between high school and college, and attended the American University in Paris. I took a class called Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties with Noel Riley-Fitch, the author of  Sylvia Beach and The Lost Generation.  Sylvia Beach was the founder of Shakespeare and Company, which was the center of the Anglophone literary world in Paris, and she was also the publisher of Ulysses.

Sylvia Beach was the first famous woman I ever encountered who had a woman lover. Beach’s partner Adrienne Monnier owned the bookstore across the street, which was the center of the French avant-garde literary movement. Both women were at the center of this world, and I was on the verge of coming out myself, so their story spoke to me both personally and on a literary level.

Although the centerpiece of Dr. Riley-Fitch’s class was her meticulous biography of Sylvia Beach, we also read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Stein, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Beckett, Robert McAlmon, and Djuna Barnes: what a feast!  Reading all of these things that were created in Paris—while living in Paris!—was a seductive and mind-blowing experience.  Paris changed me and I knew I had to write about it one day.

In the years that followed, I’d see books come out from time to time about literary Paris and particularly lesbian literary Paris, and I would think, oh, I meant to go back to that world.  Still, what really put me over the edge was seeing Tamara de Lempicka’s 1927 painting Beautiful Rafaela at de Lempicka’s Royal Academy of London show in 2004.  The painting is gorgeous all by itself, but what startled me was the caption, which said de Lempicka met the model in the Bois de Boulogne in 1927, drove her back to the studio, and the girl became her lover and her model: their relationship yielded six paintings.  That painting—and that caption—was the spark that lit up all the Paris material I’d been gathering and storing in my mind over the years.  The Last Nude imagines and maps the collisions and overlaps between Tamara de Lempicka’s world and Sylvia Beach’s.

Is there an element of exploitation in creating art? Do you think art in a sense impedes relationships; the artist is often observing, rather than feeling, or living?

After I finished writing The Last Nude, I realized I had been coming to a kind of shadow-articulation of my values by writing about their opposites. I value honesty, and I wrote about a liar. I value loyalty, and I wrote a novel about betrayal.

Moreover, I wrote a novel called The Last Nude, and I found out that I value modesty. Not modesty as in what one wears—I love clothes!—but in two other senses. First, I mean the kind of reticence that allows you not to engage sexually with everyone you’re attracted to, but rather allows you to form one kind of bond with your spouse and a clearly different kind of bond with your friends. But in The Last Nude, what sex means is contested and confused, and when it comes to her model, Rafaela, Tamara de Lempicka really exploits that confusion.

Second, I mean a modesty of ambition. I believe in towering ambition when it’s you alone with your work, but out in the world, I don’t think being a good artist is more important than being a good person. Tamara de Lempicka would disagree, and so would James Joyce, who figures peripherally in the novel. But Rafaela comes to believe otherwise.

Last of all, to come back to this articulation of values, it really hit home for me how much I value reciprocity. I wrote a novel about a love affair between a painter and a model in which the model thinks what she has with Tamara is a reciprocal relationship, while Tamara, despite feeling real passion for Rafaela, also assumes that sex is her prerogative as a painter. There’s an extent to which any model, any warm body, would do. And there’s a moment when Rafaela finally realizes this. So this is how you loved me, she thinks. And she says: I loved you differently.

At the same time, however, that I show Tamara exploiting Rafaela, and regretting it to the end of her days, I also give her—and the choices she made, to put art before love—the last word: I wouldn’t need to figure out for myself whether I thought it was more important to be a good artist or a good person if it weren’t a real question, and I want to give serious weight to both sides.

Obviously The Last Nude deals with the recreation of real personalities. Was it constraining to write about a real person, or sort of liberating, because you had some real material, imagery and ideas to work with/play with?

My biggest source of inhibition as a writer is wondering if anyone will care what I have to say.  Research– and writing historical fiction– helps me overcome that block: obviously someone– the scholar or biographer I’m reading– thought it was worth writing down the first time, so it seems less crazy to think someone– the reader of my novel– will think it was worth writing down a second time.  The historical facts I work with are the stepping stones that let me get across the river of the novel, or the vines that let me brachiate from branch to branch above it.

People often ask me, “How much of The Last Nude is true?”  Anything that sounds like the product of an overheated imagination– Tamara picking up Rafaela in a public park, the sex with sailors in shacks by the Seine, Tamara eating oysters off the body of a young girl at a party, the cocaine, the absinthe, and so on– all that is documented in Laura Claridge’s biography of de Lempicka and de Lempicka’s daughter Kizette’s biography of her mother.  I see that as one kind of work that historical fiction writers do, a kind of DJ work, bringing together samples and laying them side by side: you could see The Last Nude as a mashup of my Lempicka research and my Sylvia Beach/Earnest Hemingway reading.

A second kind of work historical fiction writers do involves engaging with gaps in the historical record, making things up wholecloth.  In the case of The Last Nude, we don’t know anything about the actual Rafaela: not her nationality, language, or religion, not her last name, not even if her first name was really Rafaela.  (Tamara might have chosen the name in homage to Ingres, her favorite painter, and to his erotically-charged paintings of Raphael and his curvy brunette model/mistress.)  But that’s where I get to step in and say whatever I want.  Some of my choices I made for the sake of expedience: I promised myself that after a novel set in 19th-century Japan I wasn’t going to write another novel full of translated dialogue, so I made Rafaela American.  But some of my choices I could make for thematic reasons, because I wasn’t just painting-by-biographical-numbers: more on that later.

A third kind of work that historical novelists do is counterfactual.  Everyone knows the real Ernest Hemingway lost all his work in 1922: it was stolen when his wife left it on a train.  The real Hemingway never forgave his wife, but he got over the loss of his work and went on to become, well, Ernest Hemingway.  My Hemingway figure, Anson Hall (Anson was the first name of one of Hemingway’s grandfathers, Hall was the last name of the other), is the one who never gets over the loss of that work: he becomes a kinder person than Hemingway, but a sadder one, too.

So why was I doing these three kinds of work in the same novel?  When I began telling myself the story that became The Last Nude, I had just published a first novel that did well, and I was nervous about Sophomore Slump: what if I was a one-book writer?   I began thinking more broadly about creative failure, and how grateful I am to artists in every discipline who keep working despite the many obstacles they face.

In order to let me (and, I hope, readers) think about what keeps artists going, The Last Nude focuses on three artists, each of whom loses his or her way.  One is destroyed by surfeit.  After getting everything she wants– money, a title—Tamara de Lempicka, the Art Deco painter whose affair with her model Rafaela is the cornerstone of The Last Nude, loses the hunger that made it possible for her to work.  Another of these artists is destroyed by loss.  My Hemingway character, Rafaela’s friend Anson Hall, loses all of his manuscripts, and never really picks himself up again.  My third artist, Tamara’s model Rafaela, finds success, albeit in an under-the-radar medium, the trivialized and demoted art of fashion.  But history is not on her side.

Now in the case of Rafaela, nobody’s going to feel the loss of her work in the world, because she’s fictional.  And in the case of Tamara de Lempicka, so few people have heard of her that I’d have to do too much explaining if I tried to mourn the counterfactual, fictional loss of her work.  So I based my third artist character, Anson, on the single-most-read American of 1920s literary Paris, Ernest Hemingway, because I wanted readers to really feel the absence of Hemingway’s work. I myself would be so much the poorer if Hemingway had never managed to write A Moveable Feast.

So to wrap up a very long answer to your question, I guess I use fact, counteract, and wholecloth fabrication all to the same end: to tell, I hope, a good story, in the richest possible way.

• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Window (Studio), 2008, graphite on paper, 61 x45 cm.

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• Prison, 2007, graphite on paper, 61 x45 cm.

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hole in the Wall, 2007-08, graphite on paper, 61 x45 cm.

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All images courtesy of Eleven Rivington Gallery

Hilary Berseth (SOA’ 2001) impressed with his first show at Eleven Rivington Gallery in 2008. He seamlessly blended nature with human agency; his honeycomb sculptures combined his own wood and wire armatures with wax and honey structures built by bee colonies. His manipulation of natural processes resulted in beautiful, subtle effects. The sculptures were cacti-like formations, with soft curvatures and elegant flowing lines; the poetic manifestation of mathematical formulas embedded in the natural world. Critic Karen Rosenberg, writing for The New York Times, described Berseth’s work as “a novel twist on process art.”

Berseth’s most recent show, at Eleven Rivington through February 5, 2012, is a slight departure. His graphite drawings feature some natural elements, such as plant life and clouds, but this time they are captured on a paper. The use of graphite lends the drawings an ethereal lightness, while the images, (juxtaposing a tree inside a room, or an eyeball with what look like vines or veins), masterfully blend the real and the surreal. Recurring themes are decay and impermanence; one particular drawing shows a room that could be a scene of either a demolition or a cataclysm. The floor is littered with wood pieces, and an entire wall has been ripped away, revealing a dark interior. The use of half-opened doors as an entrance into the composition suggests a psychoanalytic preoccupation, while the drawing of the eyeball references the technique of optical illusion.

Optical illusion is taken further in one of the paper sculptures, in which paper discs are conjoined to simulate a growing branch, and delicate buds are drawn onto the structure. The sculpture’s base features delicately drawn shadings, simulating shadows. The resulting effect evokes the play of light-and-shadow in a newly rigorous, artificial way. Other sculptures are pure geometric forms, more loosely referencing spirals and perforations, previously present in the honeycombs.

Berseth’s work was included in the 2011 Wax – Sensation in Contemporary Sculpture exhibition in Copenhagen, Denmark, featuring Vanessa Beecroft and Maurizio Cattelan, among others. He lives and works in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.