Read

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Continuing my exploration of word-image conjunctions, 'Read' used the war poems of Stephen Crane (1871-1900) as a source for a new cycle of visual poetry. Rendering the author's words in scrawled lines and conjoining them with emblematic images. I incorporated techniques of street writers to tag my paintings with symbols of surveillance and secrecy.

"Duston Spear's engagement with the poems of Stephen Crane represents her most recent project in a steady stream of performative collaborations and image-text projects which confront the problems of finding a resonant, contemporary language for articulating individual and collective histories. Her "posthumous collaboration" with Crane's poetry embraces the tasks of witness and poetic commentary on the historical pervasiveness of political terror and the effects of war on combatants, refugees, and those on the home front." — Deborah Frizzell, PhD