About the Exhibition

Accidental Poetry – exhibition essay by Loren Spector

Accidental Poetry presents a selection of ultraviolet screen prints by Briar Craig. Craig’s prints invite consideration of the varied and sundry fragmented visual experiences that signify moving through one’s day in a society teeming with visual debris, and invite us to question if and how we consciously or unconsciously make connections that give meaning to the messages. 

Briar Craig is a printmaker, a screen printer in particular. He has said that, “one of the reasons [he is] an ardent printmaking advocate is for its ability to amalgamate and synthesize diverse imagery, materials, and approaches to art-making.” The evolution of Craig’s work across the last twenty-some years conceals entirely where the techniques and materials of printmaking inform his work, and where the content of his imagery necessitates choosing printmaking for its materialization. But the synthesis within Craig’s work is incomplete – in the best possible way.

A duality bordering on contradiction lurks about the edges of a Briar Craig exhibition, Accidental Poetry being no exception. His pieces raise questions, and only half-heartedly suggest clues towards answers. They ask us to examine the relationship and the separation/space between form and content, between media and message, between art and gallery space, between the personal and the public, and between viewer and art.

It is typical, when approaching “printmaking” in a gallery setting, to move in close to the work, nose-to-glass as it were, in order to better read the fine marks, layers and intricacies of the piece. While Craig’s prints are certainly intricate, the extensive layers of translucent colour, tactile surface qualities and myriad nuances and subtleties generated by the photographic process uncharacteristically lead the viewer to step back – to take in a broader view of the work and perhaps to seek a context that distance might provide.

These are narrative images that read very successfully as abstract work – an esthetic that will happily usurp the minor impetus of theory within, should the viewer allow that to happen.

Ah, but what of those unanswered questions? One can lose oneself in the attraction of the ink for only so long, before returning to the beguiling nature of the narrative/poem presented. Yet a theorized reading of the images does not determine a foregone conclusion of meaning therein. Craig marries Dada and absurdist thought with a Pop Art sensibility. Can an object at once have meaning provided by the context of its reception, and also be so commonplace as to lose all significance except as a symbol of how well we know it? (i.e. is an image of a National Geographic magazine cover a place­ holder for associations with the wild, untamed corners of the Earth, or an ironic reference to boxes stored in musty garages?)

Craig writes, “Whether we are walking down a street, listening to a radio, surfing television channels, or reading a newspaper each of us will be individually drawn to specific things for specific and personal reasons... My frequent use of hand written texts and of weathered objects is an attempt to appeal to the viewer on the most basic and ‘human’ of levels. The texts and objects I use are often the ‘clues’ we leave behind that reveal who we are and the kinds of things that occupy our lives.”

In the works shown at the Artist Proof Gallery, Craig employs a principle of chance to bring found words together in what he calls accidental poetry. Words that might not typically be connected are juxtaposed for their provocative and evocative potential, to invite interpretation. But Craig’s evident choice of just exactly what words will be juxtaposed is an aware and artful mischief that challenges viewers to interpret the clues he leaves behind in his text/object-pairings to deduce an intended meaning, all the while instinctively aware of our own individual meaning-making practices.