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ROBERT
BARNSTONE GALLERY: THE NARRATIVE FOREST |
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The Narrative Forest
24 stands with poems
Height 36" width 18" length 18"
Cedar, Laser Etched Stainless Steel. |
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The Narrative Forest was selected to
be included in the
Convergence International Arts Festival
in Providence RI, where it is currently on
display, and sponsored by the Cultural
Affairs Department and by CAPArts (Capital
Arts). It has been invited also to be
exhibited at the International Word/Art
Conference in Paris. Next year it will be
the subject of a special issue of the
literary magazine The Red Rock Review. |
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The Narrative Forest is a
collaboration between the architect and
sculptor Robert Barnstone and three poets in
his family: his brother,
Tony Barnstone, his sister,
Aliki Barnstone, and
their father, Willis
Barnstone. It is an interdisciplinary
work that joins art, architecture and
poetry, creating a physical space for
literature, a sculptural environment for the
exploration of meaning. The Narrative Forest
uses fairly simple cedar and steel
constructs to support poems laser-etched on
sculpturally bent stainless steel plates.
The space of the imagination is redefined by
creating sculpture-poems set in a park or
college green to redefine the viewers’’
understanding of the public space. Through
the act of reading, the imagination posits a
second understanding of the physical
environment; there is an overlay of the
poems on the green. The park becomes a
forest of poems, moments of meaning, and the
reader physically wanders through the text,
turning pages by walking from sculpture to
sculpture. Each piece in this body of work
is conceived as an intriguing container
where the volume within the object is
inaccessible to the eye and therefore is
constructed in the imagination as a void
with a distinct shape, vessels of darkness,
containers of the unknown. The void is
equally important as the material substance
of the work, giving it volume and presence,
and allowing us to read the form that holds
the text we read.
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