CAConrad at fluent – Artforum International
In CAConrad’s poem-rituals, phrases don’t play coy. For the Kansas-born poet, language is much less a refuge or flight of fancy than a method of dealing with ache head-on; theirs is the emphatic and sincere bedside method wanted by an ailing planet. “13 Moons: Hearken to the Golden Boomerang’s Return,” the artist’s first solo exhibition, is constructed from two current collections of concrete poetry. The 13 poems comprised by 13 Moons, 2014, are hung alongside the curved finish of the gallery, whereas every of the 4 Antiwar Poems, 2022, seems emblazoned on a big white banner draped from the ceiling. Their kinds—redolent of sails, sabers, or droplets—tackle the mass and presence of sculpture; they fill the area like bonfire flames.
As a part of the exhibition, Conrad delivered a mixture of a poetry studying, an artist speak, and an improvised slideshow that guided viewers by way of a travelogue of America’s grit and style, surveying the quiet of the desert, associates misplaced to violence or AIDS, crystals and shamans, carbon-capture machines, killer drones, the approaching recriminalization of abortion by the hands of “witch-burning Christians,” and a crow that after introduced Conrad every day items in trade for crackers and peanuts. All through, the artist’s phrases nicely up like tears of rage, coloured by each an aversion towards and a cussed compassion for that the majority bruised and twisted of countries.
The efficiency ended with one of many poems from 13 Moons, addressed to the artist’s trucker boyfriend, a bristly, uncompromising man whose each rendezvous with Conrad takes place in a distinct city or truck cease alongside the interstate: “all my associates hate you / you’re like my imply previous / Feline Thor who / alienated us each / from everybody / a most divisive / cat / however I’m loyal.”
— Ren Ebel
