The HCC Center of Excellence for Visual and Performing Arts is pleased to present an exhibition at the Central Visual Arts Gallery in concert with Print Houston, a citywide celebration of printmaking and print media. A Revision of Forward is the result of a fifteen-year collaboration between writer Wendy McGrath, and University of Alberta Professor Emeritus and printmaker Walter Jule. Early iterations of poems and prints in this project were exhibited in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and the project culminated in the publication of McGrath’s book of poetry A Revision of Forward (NeWest Press 2015) which was launched at Edmonton’s SNAP Gallery in September 2015.
The collaboration between McGrath and Jule is one based on curiosity, a mutual interest in memory, and in the expansive possibilities presented by the collision of different artistic approaches to the same subject matter. McGrath’s poems provide glimpses of experiences both tactile and abstract, at times faint yet powerful. Jule’s prints are similarly fragmented, as well as simultaneously physical and ethereal. Going beyond a simple “call and response”, from poem to print and print to poem, both artists’ works now directly reference and reflect each other in a cyclical act of collective recall. The collaborative works included in A Revision of Forward speak to the visceral quality of memories, and augment our understanding of the act or remembering in a way that reverberates beyond the paper.
Wendy McGrath is the author of two poetry collections and three novels including: Santa Rosa and North East. Her most recent book of poetry, A Revision of Forward (NeWest Press 2015) is the culmination of a long-term collaboration of poetry and prints between herself and renowned printmaker Walter Jule. As part of the group QUARTO & SOUND, she recently released the CD “BOX”—a spoken word/voice/experimental jazz/noise adaptation of McGrath’s “mirror” poem: “Box.” University of Alberta Professor Emeritus Walter Jule is well-known as a printmaker and designer. He has shown in over 300 international exhibitions in 43 countries, and his work can be found in over 60 major public collections around the world including the national galleries of Canada, Australia, India as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has curated exhibitions for the Hara Museum, Tokyo; the Li Hai Su Museum, Shanghai; The National Theatre Gallery, Brasilia and the City Gallery, Prague, among many others.
