(EDITOR'S NOTE — Check out our story on the new exhibit now on display at Mirabo Press in Buffalo by artist Chris Fritton. Be sure to check out the short video snippet at the bottom of this page as well to get a better sense of Chris's work. We hope you get to the Mirabo Press gallery to see this amazing project. — Photo by Benjamin Joe/1120 Press)
The space feels like one of the old abandon buildings in which Chris Fitton — Buffalo poet, printer and artist —might have skateboarded while growing up. Pallets of wood on the floor, an old chair no longer usable sitting in the corner of the room that is consumed by a palpable darkness.
Yet, cutting through the blackness is a white light flashing, projecting words which lie at the center of Fritton’s ‘Follow Me Into the Harness of the World’ exhibition now on display at the Mirabo Press Gallery in Buffalo.
Fritton’s installation, as explained on the Mirabo website, is an immersive exhibit that contains dozens of large-scale works in origami-like folds, projected in a series of stop-motion animations of text progressing through different phases. It also includes audio recordings of the fractured verse.
“This is a single poem, a single sentence deconstructed and reconstructed by a series of folds. I printed that single line over and over again,” explained Fritton, former studio director of the Western New York Book Arts. “I’d fold the paper, print it, then unfold it. I would then reprint it again and unfold it, and that’s where you get these different aspects of the exact same line.”
The project’s materials, according to Mirabo, are presented in an atmosphere that reflects the power of chance operations and the corrosive nature of interpretation.
Prints hang from the ceiling. All reconstructions, perhaps different interpretations of that single sentence, as music and vocalized words form their own pattern for the listener.
“The audio we’re hearing is also formed in that exact space,” Fritton told 1120 Press. “I walked around and used the entire space as a performance. The metal that you see. The pallets that you see. Running my hands across them and then reading what I saw around them at the same time.”
“Follow me into the harness of the world and back and pick supple guns I may carry,” Fritton’s poem reads.
“The idea is that the harness of the world — everything we see around us — if we want information, if we want meaningful information, there has to be a binary. There has to be black and white, there has to be near and far. There has to be all of those things — ones and zeros — if we’re thinking literally. That’s the harness of the world. That thing we’re trapped in. We think about that. The only way we might be able to escape is emotionally.
“The supple guns are other tools,” Fritton added. “So, I’m trapped in the harness of the world. What are the other tools that I may use to get out of that? Some of these things may be very amorphic, so if I want any information written, it has to be black or white. There has to be a contrast. But if there’s love, all of sudden it’s incredibly amorphous. It’s very dirty. It’s a very messy concept. So, I love the idea that the supple guns might be something that folds out of that binary.”
The destruction and reconstruction of the idea in Fritton’s work is very constant in order to both get the message across and change the meaning to the viewer.
“I think there’s a lot of good selections. The physicality of it, whether it be the breaking or the folding or anything else that is real,” said Fritton. “I feel it’s gone through a series of disintegrations and reconstructions in a way that feels very cyclical … It comes together then falls apart again.”
Fritton will be presenting an artist’s talk at Mirabo on Thursday, Sept. 12. Gallery hours are Thursdays 6-8 p.m. or by appointment. More information on Fritton’s exhibit can be found HERE. )
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