Registration Required. April is National Poetry Month- join Main Library’s Adult Programming Assistant Beth online as she joins a special Zoom poetry program hosted by the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College.

The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum is happy to welcome back visual artist Cyriaco Lopes and poet Terri Witek to Flagler College for a participatory virtual event on Thursday, April 8 at 5:30 pm in collaboration with the St. Johns County Public Library System to celebrate National Poetry Month. The event is free and open to the public, and registration is required. Register here today!

Zoom has become a ubiquitous part of both our personal and professional lives during the course of the pandemic. Through The Keepers, Lopes and Witek utilized Zoom as an investigation of the gap between images and text, as orchestra, as conversation, as interactive performative work. The artists encourage viewers to participate in the creation of both visual and auditory elements in order to generate a unique art experience on this newly popular platform.

We would appreciate the audience’s participation during this event, and therefore we will request all participants to turn on their cameras (aka share video) and unmute themselves during certain segments of the performance. While full participation is strongly encouraged, we understand that not everyone might feel comfortable showing their faces and lending us their voices, and there will be ample opportunity to participate in the event through the chat function.

Can’t make this live event? Not to worry! The St. Johns County Public Library System will present a recording of this event on our website, on our Facebook page, and on our Youtube channel on May 5th at 12:00 pm that you can watch at your convenience. Visit here for more details!

About the artists:

The work of Cyriaco Lopes Terri Witek combines images and texts in a lyrical meditation on the passage of time and on the imperfect language of what remains and is transformed. Thus, they bring together fragments of history and cultural landscapes: decontextualized museum cartouches and manuals, sculptures and places. Interested in both the genealogies of experimental visual poetry and those of the visual essay, in their work, mythology, history, and archaeology weave a delicate plot that refers us to when philosophy was poetry and art was life. From the beginning, their artistic work as a duo values both chance and choice, investigating the different visual poetics of the text-image binomial.

Their various projects range from postcards given to strangers on the street to site-specific installations, artist’s books, and participatory performances. Always giving great importance to cultural memory, multilingualism, and the trace of a deep past, they also recover materiality as a central element. Understood as a whole, woven of everyday vestiges, the work of Cyriaco Lopes Terri Witek suggests that the convergence of different means of expression and disparate bodies gives rise to a third mysterious thing that may resemble the future.