C. Tweedie: ekphrastic fragments

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][thb_image full_width=”true” alignment=”center” lightbox=”true” image=”22792″][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][thb_image full_width=”true” alignment=”center” lightbox=”true” image=”22791″][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][thb_image full_width=”true” alignment=”center” lightbox=”true” image=”22793″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]ekphrastic fragments: poetics in response
2020
Digital collage
11 x 17 in.

ekphrastic fragments is a triptych of cryptic inscriptions written in response to the art of our altered environment, letters linked to tangible climate waver but exploring the unsavory personal result, the cosmic or internal resistance to a resistance ethic: the fear of action buried in embossed scribbles and obscured by the volume and amplitude of Corporate News Media. The fragments espouse that the New York Times reports on Shell, Exxon, and Chevron’s earnings while simultaneously touting the merit of their “energy expansion efforts,” seldom turning either a critical eye toward or a fiscal eye from such climate influencers, though the piece itself wavers in condemnation of the activities of big oil. Fear is difficult to overcome in the face of unfettered power, especially when that power threatens the rape of a loved one; in this way, fragments documents my continual personal process of grieving, fearing, resisting, and retreating in the relatively nascent expressions of my own climate activism. Literal expressions of grief manifest in the poetics, questioning the death of an aunt to cancer, a set of parents to unknown cause, a social life to a spelling contest, all such in response to art, as ekphrastic indicates “a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined.” These poems render equally as dramatized responses to the art of real, continual and visual tragedy at the hands of oil interests—fires on the gulf or embossed logos on the banner-stretches of my favorite music festivals—inasmuch as they render responsive to artistic works already invested in the deconstruction of such entities. I have overlaid archival materials with a parallel-building compilation of verbal resentments that I have collected over the course of this course, and this dirty verbal plaquing culminates in three poems “fragment I,” “fragment II,” and “fragment III,” each embodying a distinct—but not necessarily chronologically ordered—step in the process of contextualizing the scale and potentiality for tragedy that the big-3 oil companies pose to liberty and climate.

 

C. Tweedie
fragment I
2020
Digital collage

C. Tweedie
fragment II
2020
Digital collage

C. Tweedie
fragment III
2020
Digital collage[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]