DATE for initial proposals: September 30

FINISHED ART WORK: December 31

 

“reading time through light”: a multimodal experience for Jennifer Whalen’s Eveningful

 

Lightscatter Press, an independent nonprofit literary publisher, seeks an artist to create works in response to a book of poems. The works can be created in any two dimensional medium: photography, paint, collage, etc. Work can be figurative or non-figurative. The pieces will be rendered digitally, and may also be exhibited physically. We are most interested in a true dialogue with an artist—a conversation between the book, the author, and the artist’s response. Works would respond to multiple poems.

About the book: Eveningful, by Jennifer Whalen, uses markers of time to articulate a persistent deliberation and meditation, and the power of various thresholds—of time, of space, of light—to regulate and free the self. The speaker of the poems experiences evening as both an outward transition we experience (the sky turning “a pink so precise it tastes grapefruit”; restaurant lights dimming “to the edge of non-existence”), as well as an interior meditation. Taken together, the poems and artworks might be understood as a meditation on time, and how time, as a human construct, regulates (and fails to regulate) the self.

 

Works created by the artist would take the following forms:

 

• digital artifacts, that can be viewed and interacted with by a reader in a digital space (to be created by Lightscatter Press)

• (potentially) physical/analog artifacts, that could be viewed and interacted with in physical spaces (to be arranged for by Lightscatter Press)

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To see sample poems from Eveningful, click here. The artist chosen to complete the work will receive the entire manuscript.

 

To see examples of previous multimodal, interactive artwork in response to books published by LIghtscatter Press, see:

 

• UNDERSHORE, by Kelly Hoffer (cyanotype, kozo paper quilt made by the author, and digitized into a quilt app; and a textile book, made by Lauren Callis, painter, photographer, and fiber artist)

 

• Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, by Anna Scotti (digital cards, made by three artists—Kris Parkinson, Kristy Sabey, and Jim Anderson—turned into a digital deck; music composed by Isaac Bickmore and Alex Duran)

 

Compensation to the artist: $2000, with additional possible for materials

 

To submit a proposal: Please send a letter of interest, and a link to 5-10 work samples, to lightscatterpress@gmail.com, by Sept. 30. Any questions may also be directed to that email address.