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Visual Arts 2024-2025 Visual Arts 2022-2023 Visual Arts 2020-2021 Visual Arts 2016-2019
ARCHIVES ● CALENDAR ● MASTHEAD ● SUBMIT ● TIP JAR ● SOCIAL MEDIA
Visual Arts 2024-2025 Visual Arts 2022-2023 Visual Arts 2020-2021 Visual Arts 2016-2019
Kristine Snodgrass, Visual Arts Editor
To have your visual art considered for a future issue please contact [email protected]
To have your visual art considered for a future issue please contact [email protected]
February 2026 - Jay Snodgrass
ARTIST STATEMENT
Collage does most of the talking. Asemic is where it starts, disruptions on the dictionary page, interruption, call-outs to nowhere, indicators pointing outward to the sky. My intent is less about covering than testing. I want to see what the diagram indicators are hiding.
I start by disrupting the dictionary page with asemic. It’s the texture of the thin paper and the clear adjustment of columns. Also, it receives the ink most delicately. For me, the dictionary page arrives convinced of its usefulness, less referential than a weather system. And the words do not quite say what they may have once promised. So I add interruptions, liquid ink glides across what authority meaning is imbued with other purpose, with other gestures, other elements that behave as if they’ve wandered in from some other holy office party.
I give what floats voice to its own instance. The cardinal, like a holy icon, looks directly into your eyes, even as it fights itself. The bird witnesses your decisions. The aircraft appear as omens; having forgotten why they were invented, they drift through the war patterns in my dreams. Construction machines appear suddenly, mid-thought, mid-page, intruding on definition, like an urgency, I misplace them here, where they can be free, no longer interested in advancing history’s structures. And the remnants of dissected bodies, apparition as leftover, enters through the diagram, promptly misplacing his labels. I want to examine the melted infographic, to investigate how nothing resolves, how everything hovers politely.
BIO
Jay Snodgrass is an asemic artist, publisher, and poet. His asemic work is derived from the far edges of poetic practice in the expanded field. His visual work and collage seek to explore the imposition of language in its graphic form upon our human understanding of the world.
His asemic work has appeared in Diode, Lockjaw Magazine, Excuse Me Mag, and Asemic Front 2, Slowforward, The South Florida Poetry Journal, Utsanga, and Big Bridge; as well as the asemic chapbooks, Masks from Paperview Books, and Book of 12 Heavens from Contagion Press.
Born in Florida and raised in Japan, Jay Snodgrass is Editor of Hysterical Books, a publisher of poetry and visual arts. He currently teaches English at Southern Regional Technical College in Southwest GA.