We are bombarded with words everywhere we look. We want to make them good words.
T h e J a b b e r w o c k y S e r i e s intends to change the way poetry is read, and who reads it, by taking it out of unopened books and off the shelf, and placing it back in the world, where it will be seen. We want poetry on walls – gallery walls, brick walls, billboards, shop shutters. We want to use the spaces used to sell things to say things. We want people to be exposed to it, and interested in it, and moved by it. It is a new way to publish, a new way to communicate, and a new way to use the city.
Available Space is the first poetry exhibition in the series. It will open on the 12th March, and is being held in an empty commercial property on the main square in Smithfield.
The exhibition is a collaborative project between The Dodo Collective, an emerging artists’ collective working in new media, and Alan Jude Moore, a Dublin poet. It will feature one poem by Moore, presented five times by the five artists. They will use film, projection, illustration and installation, challenging the view of poetry as a staid art form, and demonstrating the concept of reading it in a completely different way.
By using a dormant commercial space, and others blank spaces like it as the series goes on, we want to begin to use they city that we have made as a place to be lived in, and let it become a canvas for art and thought.
The theme of the exhibition is this idea of urban awareness - awareness of real life taking place in a place of business, and of how we communicate with each other and our environment in the hub of a city. The title, theme and location connect to draw attention to the way in which the successes and failures of the economy affect out physical environment, and incorporate the ideas of isolation and urban anomie.
Throughout T h e J a b b e r w o c k y S e r i e s, the themes, locations and collaborators will change, while remaining faithful to the constant project of putting words on walls. We plan to involve both budding and blooming writers and artists, creating a community of ideas and a new audience to hear and see them.
The Dodo Collective is Simon Mc Keagney, Suzanne Van der Lingen, Henderson, Grace McEvoy, Luobo Gelda.
The Poet Alan Jude Moore is a Dublin born poet whose work has been widely published in Ireland and abroad. His fiction has twice been short-listed for the Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Writing, and has published two collections; Black State Cars, in 2004 and Lost Republics in 2008, both with Salmon Poetry. His work was recently included in MARKS, a collaborative project between the visual arts magazine Circa and Dublin literary magazine The Stinging Fly.
Two of Alan's poems, Drift and Alphaville, featured in the last issue of Moloch.
His unpublished poem ‘Pipeline’ will be the basis for the exhibition.
