Opening Friday, March 4, 7pm
Closing event and publication launch Saturday, April 16, 7pm
Curated by Gabriel Saloman

Future Concrete is an exhibition of visual poetry by seven North American poets, creating answers and further questions to the question  “what comes after this?”

Each poet was invited to engage questions of what poetics might be forty years on in order to address what a concrete poetics might be in our present. In no way intended to be a survey of visual poetry, this exhibition instead invites conversations about what materiality means in poetry (at this moment; for that artist), how a relationship with technology (past, present, future) informs poetic production, and what correspondence between form and content the modes of circulation, publication and reproduction employed in this exhibit have with what is made. Instead of a technophilic centring of the machinery of production – substituting digital for analog, algorithm for procedure – the focus of this work returns to the materiality of the body as a site of labour, desire, conflict and affect.

Participating poets will also read at The Capilano Review’s space, 281 Industrial Avenue, on Thursday March 3, 7pm. Details at https://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/future-concrete–readings–future-soup/.

This exhibit is part a larger frame of programming during the year of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Helen Pitt Gallery, imagining the possibilities of cultural production 40 years from now.

Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer currently completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where his studies focus on digital humanities and indigenous poetics. Abel’s conceptual writing engages with the representation of indigenous peoples in anthropology and popular culture.

bill bissett  originalee from lunaria ovr 300 yeers ago in lunarian time sent by shuttul thru halifax nova scotia originalee wantid 2 b dansr n figur skatr became a poet n paintr in my longings after 12 operaysyuns reelee preventid me from following th inishul direksyuns.

Danielle LaFrance is an MA student, occasional librarian, and poet based in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. She is the author of Species Branding (CUE Books, 2010) as well as the chapbook Pink Slip (Standard Ink & Copy Press, 2013). She co-curates About a Bicycle, a self-identified women’s critical theory reading and journal series.

Donato Mancini makes visual and procedural poetry, bookworks and visual art. His books and chapbooks include: Snowline (2015), You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012), Buffet World (2011) Fact ‘N’ Value (2011), Hell Passport no.22 (2008), Æthel (2007), 58 Free Coffees (2006) and Ligatures (2005). His most recent full length book, Loitersack (2014), is a labyrinthine commonplace book where critical, theoretical and paraliterary tendencies intersect in the forms of poetry, poetics, theory, theory theatre, laugh particles and many many questions.

sidony o’neal is [still, yet, often] learning to read. She is the trans\creator of a book of poems and essays  entitled Prognosis: Decolonial Poetic Exhale. sidony is 1/7th of the Mini Chapbook Press, a collective interested in the informal distribution of tiny books and text objects; she is the author of the mini chapbook 
f a c e bowl. sidony lives and studies in Portland, OR.

Anahita Jamali Rad‘s work involves feminist-materialist interjections into dominant ideology with regard to love, violence, and capital. She is an organizing and founding member of the women’s critical reading and discussion group, About a Bicycle, and co-editor for the journal with the same name. Additionally, she is a member of the Mini Chap Book Press, with which she has published You & Me Baby and the forthcoming Un In Uni Form.

The Third Thing is Ivy Johnson and Kate Robinson. They create live performances and multimedia collages in the service of an ecstatic feminist agenda.

Gabriel Saloman is a Vancouver based artist working in sound, text, visual and time-based practices. He has participated in numerous collaborative projects including Red76, the STAG Library and the Lower Mainland Painting Co. As a musician he has performed internationally as both a soloist and one half of the group Yellow Swans, and currently composes music for contemporary dance.