Concordance Book

CONCORDANCE is a new collaborative work by two acclaimed contemporary artists, poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and sculptor Kiki Smith. Inspired by Smith's image of a dandelion, whose floating silks Berssenbrugge compares to reading, the poet asks, "What if images were Eros as words?" In her deceptively childlike book, with its aura of fairy tale, large type and over-scale imagery, Berssenbrugge's poem traces embeddings of human and animal bodies, ideas, dreams and emotion in a concordance of parallel and contingent contexts. Smith's pochoirs of Eros as seeds, feathers, star-like explosions, and wide-eyed, unblinking owls embed the emotion Berssenbrugge's poetry ignites through brilliant insights that surface as layers of a "streaming consciousness . . . emanating from stars symbiotic with individuation. A second poem, RED QUIET, designed by Smith as brown typography on red Eames paper, explores the related theme of the force fields of attraction and repetition that can be created by words, emotion, images "He calls the location of accidents a morphic field: their recurrence is resonance, as of an archetype with the vibration of a seed." A Special Editions of Concordance, signed by Berssenbrugge and Smith and containing a limited edition print of an actual page of the book, is available from KSP for $350.Read More