The Coalesce Exhibition, held at the Eno Arts Mill Gallery and operated by the Orange County Arts Commission, is a collaborative project between poets and visual artists that will run through the end of January. Designed as a creative exercise, a group of selected poets and artists within the Commission collaborate to create pieces which communicate and expand on one another.
This all took place during a dinner hosted by the Arts Commission, where artists and poets exhibited their work. After getting to know one another, the poets were asked to rank which visual artist they would like to work with, and the artists were asked the same.
After being paired, the poets and artists exchanged pieces, which they then used as inspiration to create their own original works.
“It really lended itself to such a creative challenge of being inspired by someone else’s work and being able to riff off of that and then really put your own spin on it through your visual art,” Kate Kryder, one of the artists, said.
Kryder was paired with poet Cassidy Englund. The two agreed to only communicate a handful of times during the whole process and agreed to keep the final product a surprise for each other.
The exhibit requires that artists create something with a rigid prompt — something they must adhere to — placed upon them by their partner. Kryder said that this exhibit challenged her creatively and took her outside her comfort zone, which was especially important as she has recently decided to dedicate more time to her creative pursuits.
For Englund, it was surprising to see what Kryder took as the main focus of their poem. Englund enjoys the ekphrastic form — arts-based poetry. For them, this experience was the first time someone took their work and looked at it using the same lens they do to create their poems.
“It was just a cool way to get a more holistic look at the language between poetry and visual art and to see the whole process take place,” Englund said.
For visual artists, everything must be said implicitly through the colors, images or techniques used. Some works are more overt than others, but this exhibit allowed for a clear voice to be attached to the work through the poems, and vise versa through visual art.
