The Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library
847 Chapel St
New Haven, CT 06510
United States
Free and open to the public.
The Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library is proud to present our summer show A Blue Dark. In this exhibition, Connecticut-based visual artist Fritz Horstman collaborates with Paris-based poet, translator, and Zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Sea Summit, 2016) to explore a cross-genre range of textual/non-textual responses to the presence of a luminous dark. Both artists meditate on its changing physicality, materiality, space, emotions, images, meanings, and music by dialoguing with each other’s work—ink drawings, poetry, and translation—inspired by the complexity of black, gray, and white, as well as their fluid mysteries of being.
A limited-edition catalogue featuring the work of Horstman and Sze-Lorrain will be published on this occasion and made available for sale at the Library.
The opening reception will occur from 3-6 pm on June 1st. Fritz Horstman and Fiona Sze-Lorrain will read from 5-6 pm.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. Most recently, she is the translator of Yi Lu’s Sea Summit, a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016, and author of The Ruined Elegance, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry.
The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important contemporary Chinese poet to American readers.