Writers, visual artists team up for Verbatim

It’s an art experiment: Mix two creative types, and see what happens.

Spokane is invited to observe the results Saturday at Verbatim, part gallery show and part stage show by 16 artists – eight writers paired with eight visual artists.

The project was conceived by Spokane’s poet laureate, Thom Caraway, and fellow poet Jeffrey Dodd. Caraway teaches writing at Whitworth University. Dodd teaches at Gonzaga. They pulled together the participants for a short summer meeting, matched them up through a drawing, and stood back.

The effort will culminate in a Create Spokane event Saturday, starting at Ink Art Space before moving next door to the Bartlett. A silent auction of the work made by the artists will benefit the youth arts center.

Caraway said the idea behind Verbatim was to provide the matches, an exhibition date and “the freedom to do whatever they could come up with” by working together.

“They had me at collaboration,” Spokane poet Ellen Welcker said. Welcker and her partner in art, printmaker Lindsey Merrell, hadn’t met before. They were pleased to discover they had an overlapping interest in the end of the world. Welcker already had written some “end-times” poems, Merrell said, and she was interested in making some apocalyptic prints.

Their final product: a series of wearable end-of-the-world sandwich boards – the kind worn by people in end-of-the-world movies, Merrell said – that combine images and new poetry.

Welcker said she’d always wanted to make art with another artist. She and Merrell wanted their efforts to be truly collaborative – a combined effort, rather than two artists creating separate works side by side.

“It’s exciting to add the element of the unknown – of working with another brain, with another set of values, and trying to find the place where those values intersect,” Welcker said.

Caraway said he’d heard bits and pieces about other pairs’ plans. He knew poet Jonathan Potter and graphic novelist Simeon Mills planned to bring a set for their performance, and the set would somehow involve underwear.

“And they would be dressed as underwear and reciting from the piece, and there are guest readers and parodies of Robert Frost,” Caraway said.

Other participants include Shawn Vestal, Tod Marshall, Karli Ingersoll and Amy Sinisterra.

Caraway said he expected something “really interesting and kind of kooky” after artist Matt Comi – who works in a variety of mediums – and author Sharma Shields were matched up. They ended up exchanging emails that “evolved into these crazy, long, narrative poems, kind of, where they send each other pictures of really strange things and then tell stories about the pictures,” Caraway said. “Then, somehow, that’s all going into a pillow that is hand-stitched and embroidered by Matt, and that’s going to be their art object.”

Caraway wasn’t sure how the pillow – the gallery-show part of their work – would translate into performance art.

There were other unknowns, too, he said. But “it’s going to be really interesting, whatever happens,” he said. “It won’t be a kind of reading that people have seen before.