About this exhibition
Call & Response is an annual exhibit at George Mason University, featuring collaborations between writers and visual artists. The result is a dynamic set of paired works of words and artistic media that resonate and speak to contemporary issues. The theme for Call & Response 2020 is Structures.
The curators and organizers for Call & Response: Structures include Heather Green (Asst. Professor, Interarts), J. Carrier (Asst. Professor, Photography), Stephanie Grimm (Art Librarian and Fenwick Gallery Manager), and Andi Benge (MFA candidate and Fenwick Gallery Graduate Assistant).
This event is presented as part of the Fall for the Book Festival. Learn more about Fenwick Gallery and the history of this exhibition series on the Fenwick Gallery website.
About the participants:
Victoria Mendoza x ANDiLAND
Victoria Mendoza (she/her/hers) is a poet currently in the D.C Metro area, pursuing her MFA at George Mason University. She was a finalist for the 2020 Joseph A. Lohman III Poetry prize and the recipient of the 2019 Mary Roberts Rinehart Poetry prize. Her work can be found in Feral Journal (forthcoming), Pussy Magic Magazine and The Forge Magazine. When she isn't writing about mythology, the body, and forests, she can be found on Twitter @magpiegeneral.
“As my partner and I discussed our understanding and interest with the idea of “structures”, we quickly started to think about how natural and manufactured structures interacted with each other. As with all things, there isn’t much of a strict divide between the structure, itself, of our definitions/understandings. The human body, for example, could reside within both natural and manufactured structures. Social structures, too, can seem at once natural and manufactured. When discussing our pieces, we wanted to interrogate these ideas and see what commentary the pieces, connected, could add to this conversation.”
ANDiLAND: My work 🐰 invites viewers 🤗 through the looking glass of reality 🌈 down the rabbit hole 😈 of my personal female 👄 psyche, a dreamworld 🍭 otherwise known as 🔪 ANDiLAND. 🧨 Working in several media, my campy paintings🎨, kitschy 💗 sculptures and mischievous ✨ videos create a whimsical 🧨🐇💋💗🌸💉🍩 wonderland 🌸 of immersive sensory overloads. 🐇 I interrogate 💄 the idea of women and violence ⚔️ through the lens of popular culture 💘 utilizing the language of 🎉 entertainment & simulacra. Exploiting 💉 the female “grotesque” 👄 I examine the superficial 🌈 construct of reality 🍩 and play with the voluptuous 🔥 danger lurking beneath the sticky 💋 sweet surface 🍰.
Kate Keeney x Angela Terry
KS Keeney is a current second year poet in George Mason's MFA program and has received a previous MA in Film Studies from Ohio University. Her poetry has been published in Roanoke Review, The Quaker, and Route 7 Review, among others. She currently works for both phoebe and So To Speak journals, serving as Webmaster and Art Editor, respectively. Currently, KS spends most of the time reading, sleeping, and hiking.
Angela Terry is an MFA graphic design student at George Mason. She is a graphic designer as well as a professor at Northern Virginia Community college.
Caely McHale x Kate Fitzpatrick
Caely McHale is a poet from Northern Virginia. She received her BA in English from the College of William and Mary in 2017, and her MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University in 2020. During her time at George Mason, Caely was privileged to work as an editorial and production intern at Poetry Daily and was the recipient of the Heritage Fellowship. Her poetry strives to be lush, feminine, fecund—a new and very old landscape to tread on. Her poetry can be found in Radar, BlazeVOX, and the Heavy Feather Review.
Kate Fitzpatrick is an artist and educator based in Alexandria, VA. Fitzpatrick received a BFA in Painting from Clarion University of Pennsylvania (1997), an MA in art education from University of New Mexico, and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from George Mason University (2020). She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (2016) where she spent a semester in India working on art curriculum with local arts teachers. Fitzpatrick is also an art educator who was honored by the Northern Virginia Magazine as a "Northern Virginian of the Year" (2014) for her creation and implementation of an art and yoga program for youth in the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention center. In addition, Fitzpatrick received the Agnes Meyer Teacher of the Year award by the Washington Post (2013). Fitzpatrick exhibits her work throughout the US and teaches for Arlington Public Schools.
Christian Stanzione x
Michael Walton
Christian Stanzione is the Assistant Poetry Editor of Phoebe.
Michael Walton is a printmaker and sculptor living in Northern Virginia. He is currently a Masters of Fine Art candidate at George Mason University. His printmaking methods include etching, wood block and serigraph as well as digital. He uses both commercially manufactured paper and handmade paper from recycled materials, clothing and paper remnants for his prints and for artist’s books. The materials and processes he uses for sculpting varies widely. The raw materials are wood, stone, resins, clay, paper, metals, ready-made components and milled lumber. Michael creates works that examine social conditions such as the exploitation of children, along with the mismanagement of natural resources through the availability of potable water. He also explores depression and anxiety, and how we humans live both as sufferers and supporters. His recent exploration and research is centered on understanding the principals of space time and eternal paradigms. Though Michael’s work has a thematic focus based on one of the mentioned topic areas of research, the foundation is centered on his belief and faith in Jesus Christ and what He did for all.
Danielle Williams x Jorge Bañales
Danielle P. Williams is a poet and essayist from Columbia, South Carolina. She currently lives in Virginia where she is a third-year MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University. She works as an Editorial Coordinator for Poetry Daily, is the Poetry Editor for So To Speak, and is a 2019 Alan Cheuse MFA Travel Fellow. Williams strives to give voice to unrepresented cultures, making it a point to expand on the narratives and experiences of her Black and Chamorro cultures. Her poems were selected for the 2020 Literary Award in Poetry from Ninth Letter. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Barren Magazine, The Pinch, JMWW, and elsewhere. For more, visit https://www.daniellepwilliams.com
Jorge E. Bañales is a photographer and musician in the Washington DC area. He is a 2021 MFA in Photography candidate at George Mason University. He mainly photographs indoor and outdoor suburban liminal spaces. For more, visit www.jorgebanales.com
Sisc Johnson x Ian Cappelli
Sisc (Sissy) Johnson spent the majority of her childhood living in East Tennessee. She moved to northern Virginia around 1985. For the past 32 years Johnson has lived in Woodbridge, Virginia with her husband, Ben. Johnson began photographing her family after the birth of her daughter, Kristina. Her interest in photography grew tremendously after she completed her first photography class at George Mason University, where she is currently enrolled in their BFA program.
In 2019, Johnson received a scholarship from The Humid, GA, and has exhibited her work at Praxis Gallery & Photographic Arts Center in MN. In 2020, she served as Sue Wrbican’s assistant, photographing the transport and installation of her sculpture, Buoyant Force. Buoyant Force is a 50-foot steel sculpture created by Wrbican and inspired by the paintings of American Surrealist Kay Sage. Commissioned by Greater Reston Arts Center, Wrbican’s structure is currently installed at Reston Town Square Park.
Lost in Pandemic, Collaborative Isolation, is a collaborative project where Johnson solicited images and received images from 74 people including artists and photographers around the globe. For this project, Johnson curated a collection of images that shared the personal quarantine experiences of individuals in a single project to promote connectedness in quarantine.
In September 2020, Johnson exhibited her work at Glen Echo Photoworks in Maryland in the group exhibit, 100 Days of Solitude.
Ian Cappelli (he, him) is a MFA candidate at GMU, and has authored the chapbook 'Suburban Hermeneutics' (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2019). His work's been twice nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net and has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Sugar House Review, Lunch Ticket, Roanoke Review, and the American Journal of Poetry, among others.
Jayne Matricardi-Burke x
Sarah Wilson
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Jayne Matricardi-Burke has been living in the DC area since 1996. After a brief career as a web designer, she became a studio art teacher in Fairfax County Public Schools. She has taught at Woodson High School since 2001. She received a bachelor’s degree in painting and art history from the University of Virginia, and a master’s degree in education from the George Washington University. She is currently pursuing an MFA in painting at George Mason University.
“Art can act as a form of reparative memory of what cannot be otherwise adequately represented.” This assertion, from Susan Best’s Reparative Aesthetics, currently guides my artistic practice. I work with both family and found photographs, mostly of mothers and children, in various ways: scanning, cropping, isolating, enlarging, fragmenting, recombining, re-drawing and re-painting. Through a process of moving from analog to digital, and back again, I explore ways in which looking deeply into minute sections of a photograph can transform and inform a personal narrative, in which past, present, and future are simultaneous. This piece, based on a mother-and-child portrait of my grandmother and great-grandmother, depicts a literal and figurative breakdown of structure, while hinting at the possibility of rebuilding and healing.
Sarah Wilson is a 3rd year MFA Candidate in Creative Writing with a concentration in Nonfiction. She is currently working on her thesis which investigates the relationship between isolation and solitude. She spends her days taking leisurely walks in the woods with a sweet rescue dog named Kevin. Kevin is love in a furry body and in a time when nothing makes sense, she rests her head on one's knee and lets them know that everything will be fine.
“In response to Jayne's work, I was struck by the necessity of structure and the reckoning of family identity. I thought about the roles we are given at birth, the roles we hope to inhabit, and the roles we actually play in our lives. I thought about expectation and the way it informs who we hope to be—whether realistic or not.”
Jessica Kallista x Maricielo Ampudia-Gutiérrez
Jessica Kallista is an artist working in collage, video, sound, and performance. She is also an educator, curator, and gallerist. She received her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from George Mason University in 2002. In November 2014 she founded Olly Olly, an alternative art space, in Fairfax, Virginia. Jessica has taught collage at the Corcoran School of Arts & Design GW and poetry, critical theory, aesthetics, and writing for artists at George Mason University. In summer 2020 she began curating and co-moderating CVPA's Arts in Context Kritikos Anti-Racist Reading Group. Through her multi-faceted work in visual, literary, sound, and performance art, Jessica seeks to disrupt the passive nihilism intrinsic in much of everyday life by creating situations of surprise, play, pleasure, and experimentation while instigating dialogue and experience around embodiment, identity, race, sexuality, feminism, decolonization, commodity fetishism, spirituality, and inter-connectivity. Jessica’s work has been exhibited at a variety of venues including Tempus Projects, Galerie Kritiku Prague, Rhizome, VisArts, Greater Reston Arts Center, Watergate Gallery, Target Gallery, The Torpedo Factory Art Center, The Fridge, Fenwick Gallery at George Mason University, Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, and the Margaret W. and Joseph L. Fisher Art Gallery.
Maricielo Ampudia Gutiérrez is a poet and screenwriter born in Lima, Peru but raised in Fairfax, Virginia. She writes on feminism, animal rights, and the immigrant experience in the United States. As a DACA recipient she hopes her writing will reach other Americans living undocumented. Maricielo holds a BFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Her poem “DREAMers Mark Themselves” was recently featured by Split This Rock as the poem of the week. She has two adorable guinea pigs named Frances Fisher and Alegro.
“‘Possible’ is in a tone I haven’t written in before. That’s because I’ve been trying out meditation and to my surprise, it’s been working. I’ve also been practicing gratitude and that’s also been working. These are things I thought weren’t for me like they didn’t fit my personality. But, turns out, taking a moment to stand still was what I needed. I’ve been learning to appreciate more of what I have in this world and at the same time, imagining a better world which I and we deserve. “Possible” is a meditation on the faith in possibilities for change, growth, and love.”
Rose Strode x Kerry Hentges
Rose Strode is a poet and essayist whose work has been published in such journals as The Gettysburg Review, Poet Lore, and The Broad River Review. She is a grateful recipient of the Gulick Fellowship at Valparaiso University, and a student in the MFA program at George Mason University. Rose is a Buddhist gardener, an instructor at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and an assistant editor at Stillhouse Press.
“In considering structures, Kerry and I wanted to engage in conversation as part of the call and response. The give-and-take of conversation, we felt, is not only a form of structure, but also an important habit we need to re-learn as a society: a habit of listening and reflecting rather than only reacting or defending. I think part of this decision arose from our own enjoyment in the conversations we had together, for we had similar feelings (delights as well as fears) about that most essential of structures, the ecosystem of the ocean.
”As I wrote about the kelp forests, I was surprised and delighted to hear otters and sea urchins directly addressing the reader through the poems. Is this because of the conversational structure Kerry and I chose? I think the voice of the sea urchin in "The Purple Sea Urchin Asks a Question in Modified Elegiac Couplets" was shaped by Kerry's work, which represented the kelp and the urchins in vertical quilt sections that were equal to each other. This reminded me that the urchins were not villains in this story of ecological imbalance, and it complicated my response.”
Kerry Hentges is a mixed media artist who utilizes found objects, writing, thread, and book art to confront anxiety. While anxiety motivates her studio practice, the practice in turn helps her understand and ease anxiety. According to Hentges, art is a way of understanding oneself and meditating on what is important.
Hentges' current work focuses on understanding thought patterns and emotion. According to Hentges, "thought is inherently contradictory, humans experience many emotions at once." Hentges explores this contradiction in her work through materials like wood, nails, and string and she studies the patterns they make together. The goal of her work is for others to analyze their own thoughts and find healing.
“When Rose and I first spoke, we explored the topic of structures and what that meant to each of us. We wanted to create a response with a back and forth, that built a structure of its own. When Rose brought up the idea of a quilt, I was so excited. I knew I wanted to create something with fabric, knitting together ideas. When I received Rose’s first poem, I was inspired by the detailed imagery of the underwater world she created. I jotted down key words and then pulled out fabrics that matched the rhythm and texture of the world. Her second poem was structured with short lines and I matched that with my own short pieces of fabric, all ending at different lengths like the lines of the poem.
“In this project, I took on the roll of the urchin, eating through fabric, but then bringing it back together to form something new. I repurposed fabric from my life, taking scraps of old shirts and coats. Repurposed fabric is full of life with frayed edges, worn surfaces, and texture that inspired me. I love the planet and want to help the environment by repurposing objects for my art.”
Lori Rottenberg x StrangeLens
Lori Rottenberg is a poet who has lived in Arlington, Virginia since 1987. She has published in numerous journals and anthologies and has served as a visiting poet in the Arlington Public Schools Pick-a-Poet program since 2007. She was an invited poet in the Joaquin Miller Cabin Reading Series in 2002, a finalist in the 2006 Arlington Reads Poetry Competition, and a recipient of Best Published Award in the March 2009 issue of Poetica. She has worked as a writer, an editor, a non-profit program director on behalf of migrant farmworkers, and since 2013, as an academic English instructor for international students at George Mason University. She received her Master’s in Linguistics from GMU in 1995 and is also in her first year of studies at the George Mason University MFA Poetry program.
“I think the Call and Response program offers writers a wonderful, direct way to participate in an ekphrastic process. Coincidentally, I am taking a course in Ekphrastic Poetry this semester with Jen Atkinson, and the focus is on responding to the visual in our writing. Sam’s evocative and thought-provoking video tapped into this year’s theme of “Structures” beautifully, and also gave me a chance to think more about a subject I have been concerned about for years: the expansion or destruction of homes that were for decades considered perfectly fine family dwellings. I have found it both ironic and sad that as our society has become more isolated and disconnected, we somehow demand more and more living space, and the solid brick homes of decades past are now viewed as wildly inadequate. What has changed in our society to make this true? Back in 2003, I published a poem called “Addition: Arlington, Virginia,” which details the doubts I had about expanding my then-home, a tiny 1939 colonial. It is being republished this fall in an anthology being put out by Paycock Press called Written in Arlington. In the 17 years since I first published that poem, the trend has been less on expanding those small Arlington homes than on completely tearing them down and starting over. There are many financial incentives to do that from both the builder’s and the homeowner’s perspective. Sam’s video brilliantly showed the ache of the teardown process and the endless pursuit of wanting more that drives it by juxtaposing a teardown with a Pac-Man video game. The ghosts in Pac-Man also reminded me of the ghosts that imbue any structure we have lived in with significance. As we got more involved in this process, we decided we wanted a two-way ekphrastic process, and Sam decided to respond to one of my older poems, “Keys.” It is very exciting to respond to another artistic medium and to see one’s work responded to in this way. I hope you enjoy our shared work!”
StrangeLens is a multi-disciplinary artist working primary in painting, video, performance and photography; exploring themes of dreams, the subconscious, and the darker side of human psyche. StrangeLens is currently studying MFA program in the Visual Arts at the George Mason University.
“My videos are the aftermath of my dreams and distorted reflection of society. It's cryptic and contracting at times. I care about bringing the rich visual experience to the viewer. The rest is up to them when it comes to deciphering the content.”