A Loaded Gun (2016)
“It’s not one of Cornell’s, with the shadow of some nineteenth-century dancer trapped within a wall of glass; this box has a hint of beige, like the portfolio you once had as a high school student, with its worn wraparound string that protected your entire oeuvre, drawings you did from the age of five. You’re a bit distracted. You open the box. There’s a strange, frazzled treasure trove inside, and you soon discover that the archivist has brought you a perverse portfolio, a “warehouse” containing the near-perfect facsimiles of Dickinson’s envelope-poems with their transcriptions printed in blue, plus a visual index, and other material by Marta Werner and artist Jen Bervin, who, like a pair of postmodern sorceresses, have found a way into the labyrinth of Dickinson’s deeply puzzling “word paintings” with a puzzle all their own. None of us can match Dickinson’s “synesthesia of sight and sound,” but Werner and Bervin have come as close as they can, and we realize soon enough that this is ...the most radical rendering of Dickinson we have ever seen, because it tries to replicate the visual dynamics of her work without intruding upon the mysteries of creation.MoreLess
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