Poem Drawing
Work by Sanda Iliescu
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Poem Drawing
Exhibition
Fri, Jan 30–Fri, Feb 27
Campbell East Wing Gallery
Gallery Talk & Reception
Fri, Feb 6, 12 PM
Campbell Van Lengen Lobby
In conceiving Poem Drawing, artist and Professor of Architecture Sanda Iliescu set out not so much to “draw” anything but rather to enact a process that unfolds over time and through a particular choreography of drawing actions.
Her project takes Wallace Stevens’s poem Anglais Mort à Florence (Englishman Dead in Florence) as its point of departure, a poem in eight stanzas and 24 lines that opens with the sentence “A little less returned for him each spring.” In response to the first line’s invocation of both growth (“spring”) and diminishment (“a little less”), Iliescu wrote and erased the poem repeatedly according to a set of instructions.
The script went as follows: Write the poem on a piece of paper. Erase it. Write the poem on a second piece of paper, erase it, then rewrite it this time beginning one line down from the top and erase it again. Now, take a third piece of paper, do exactly what you did in the first two steps, then write and erase the poem a third time, this time beginning two lines down from the top of the page… And so on until 24 drawings have been made, every drawing in the series showing more erasures or a “little less” than the one before it.
