Letters Project

This project had its beginnings when we – Merrill Shatzman, visual artist and Deborah Pope, poet – first shared our curiosity and desire about collaborating on a project that would create and then merge original visual art work with original creative text.  Discussions and discoveries about mutual ideas we wanted to explore progressed to the point that we applied for and received a Collaboration Development Grand from the Council for the Arts, Duke University.  Our working title was “(Re)fusing Forms: Images, Texts and Visual Poetry.

From the outset we were motivated by the extent to which we would have to learn how to inhabit each other’s artistic language and process in order to move jointly into new territory.  An emerging constant was our insistence that the art and text find a way to function interactively.  We consciously sought to move beyond traditional models of words merely paralleling images or static illustrations.  As such, we became convinced that we needed to incorporate the potential of digital media as the most exciting, expansive vehicle for translating our ever more ambitions concept into reality.

At this point, we joined forces with Raquel Salvatella de Prada, whose superb computer animation expertise meshed perfectly with the growing scope and and direction of the project.  This not only augmented the cross-fertilization of faculty collaboration, but continued to extend our mutual creativity and learning.  Together we worked through multiple experiements with textual and visual design , and the additional layering of music.

Out of this unique melding of skills and vision has emerged our multi-media installation titled “ART”.  Reflecting our own interactive, interdisciplinary, individual and collective dynamic, it aspires to simultaneously enact and celebrate the essence and process of creating itself:  Art in all of its rhythms of paradox, play persistence; its rough turns and joys; its restless circling, transcendent moments of ephemeral poise, and ceaseless seeking.