Bøger af Rosaire Appel

These poems are non-verbal, gestural, asemic -- and deaf. They can't hear me, neither can they hear you.Yet they call themselves poems --- what is a poem?Who decides?When the hand knows what it's doing, is there a problem?

This visual essay uses marks and numbers instead of words. They are fragments and scraps, shredded ideas, remains that coalesce momentarily before disintegrating further. Active rather than solidified, these are traces of traces whose origins no longer exist. We live among traces - language itself is a trace of the mind's wanderings. Shadows are traces, as are echoes, photos, memories, thoughts....

These pages are based on a series of 9"x12" mono prints. They are NOT tulips - they have no color, need no water, won't wilt and die. Perhaps they aren't haiku either.

Considering the split between words and images, reading and looking, thinking and experiencing - does anything remain level for long? This book is a visual meditation on split levels by way of pomes. A pome is a dyslectic version of poem - or it is a typographically erroneous home. Either way, the pages consist of drawings and words, lines and letters, a few abstract comics and asemic diagrams. Daily news, unavoidable, slips in behind the scenes.

What can a poem be? This is a book of visual poems that use abstract, unassigned marks as linguistic elements. These are suggestive rather than definitive compositions.

We found these stamps in a thrift shop, they were cancelled, but we proved they could still fly. This project, consisting of a limited edition of 25 8x10" color prints, has been exhibited in New York and other galleries. This book is a catalogue of the original prints.

"As it were" is a collection of seventeen non-verbal compositions that visually explore the story as a form. Considering literary forms, one sees that a poem resides in a shape that is particular to it and inviolable. A novel, however, exists in many pages that all look alike. A story occupies a limited enclosure with a consistent though malleable shape. Each story in this collection uses a different system of generators, each uses its own language. Like drawing, writing is visual and gestural, but with different constraints. Without the force of semantic content holding one's attention in a specific mode to the page, the differences between drawing and writing begin to soften and the act of looking and the act of reading begin to merge.

Writing and drawing use similar gestures to create visual fields for the eye to see and the mind to read. Make a mark and add another: this is a basic procedure and I use it here with different colored markers. Seeing precedes reading. Systems and games come about through patterns and repetitions, which introduces rules. Broken rules are not the same as spontaneity - but is this always apparent?

frames per second / frames made from video fly-overs of large drawings / sequences of repetitions with incremental changes, edited / musical structures / sound patterns / stutter poems / comics

The story struggles to surface. It is either political or lodged so deeply in the unconscious that even dreams do not pry it from redaction. Yet it persists. The pages are not entirely black; a few barely legible images can be discerned... This book illustrates a condition that affects the written word: redaction. It is like a disease that attacks the skin while leaving the armature intact.

Albumen casts its spell using disparate elements. Bits of folk tale and nursery rhyme, the surrealist prose poem, asemic writing, the gothic novel and philosophical speculation - in Albumen, the protean prose of Charles Freeland combines with the haunting, enigmatic graphics of Rosaire Appel to create a unique, book-length work of art.

This book transforms email scams about money into poetry about human desire by way of erasure. Both the original and the transformation are presented on facing pages. These emails were accumulating in my junk mail box until I transferred them to my raw materials folder which I open in idle moments. These missives, these attempts to get something from someone for nothing and the language they use ? is it intentional, or is it the result of a translation algorithm? Do these promises of money ever hook anyone? Erasure brings out another layer, no less desperate. The search for connection continues -- for better or worse.