Jessica Baran

Event: Sunday, April 10, 2011, Starting at 4pm - 6pm

Golden Age is pleased to announce a reading of Jessica Baran’s new publication Remains to Be Used. Baran will read several passages from the book followed by a screening of Robert Altman’s 1977 classic, 3 Women. 

Baran’s ekphrastic poems challenge the way we encounter the aural, visual, and textual artifacts of artists and thinkers as varied as Sergio Leone, Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, and Hank Williams. Strange and intriguing, Baran is a voyeur who provides heuristic glimpses into new aesthetic experiences. These poems peek into the tangling and untangling complexities of a performance by Jan Bas Ader, a poem by Wallace Stevens, or a video installation by Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Baran is as wildly adept in her investigations of the filmic gaze in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as she is in her poetic misprision of Derrida’s Specters of Marx or in her inhabiting of a song by Metallica. REMAINS TO BE USED invites and disorients, changes lenses, and ultimately trespasses the interior worlds of objets d’art.

---

Jessica Baran lives in St. Louis, where she is the Assistant Director of White Flag Projects and the art writer for The Riverfront Times. Originally from Northwest Indiana, she received her B.A. in visual art from Columbia University, New York and her M.F.A. in poetry writing from Washington University in St. Louis. Recently, she curated a show for the SGCI conference which coupled wallpaper by Robert Gober with new prints by Kerry James Marshall; last Spring, she curated a solo show of artwork Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's for the Front Room of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Her poetry and art criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in the Village Voice, BOMB Magazine, Art Papers, TAR Magazine, Harp & Altar, and the Tusculum Review, among others.