WHAT IS REVEALED? Multimedia Workshop w/ Wendy M. Levy

WHAT IS HIDDEN? WHAT IS REVEALED? Continuing our Surrealism Series on Saturday, January 28, 2-5pm, local weirdo and radio personality, Wendy M. Levy presents a multi-media participatory workshop on how to use existing printed media to create new works of poetry & art.

Wendy will show you how she makes collages of illustrated unintentional poetry out of old books and magazines using specific techniques you can easily replicate (and alter) to make your own. She'll discuss how this artistic process not only identifies and exposes not-so-subtle efforts at social conditioning in media, but also empowers participants to weaponize absurdity and form emergent counter-narratives that are liberating and fun. While you work on your own piece, Wendy — a longtime host on local and national commercial-free radio stations — will provide a soundtrack of relevant musical selections to help inspire your creative process. Surrealist attire is encouraged and thematic refreshments will be provided! 

We'll supply materials, but Wendy encourages you to scour your collections of papers stacked in the corner, and your local thrift store or garbage dump, for interesting things to cut up.  She suggests mid-century children's textbooks, skateboarding magazines, puppy calendars, microwave cookbooks, knitting instruction booklets, labels from food packaging with cool fonts, and other ephemera you like. Although attendees will be playing with scissors and glue, this workshop is exclusively for adults, age 18 and over (Wendy curses a lot, and some of the emerging poetry and art are likely to express mature subjects). Advanced tickets are recommended so we can prepare to have enough supplies for everyone. Thanks!

Artist Bio:

Wendy M. Levy was born into absurdity. She came into the world from a mixed marriage in the year Richard Nixon announced his resignation. Her childhood home was in a declining working-class town surrounded by wealthy suburbs in the most ridiculous — and ridiculed — state in the nation, New Jersey. Wendy gre up amidst dysfunctional oddballs trying their hardest to appear normal and perfect. She would never figure out how to do that, and from a young age she gave up trying. Instead, she moved to Vermont and graduated from Marlboro College. Since then, she learned more about cheese than everyone reading this, combined. She helped start a pirate radio station. She wrote for a newspaper they give away for free. She marched in a Mardi Gras parade dressed as the Goddess of Tchotchkes. Currently she lives in a slanty, 140-year-old house painted in birthday-cake colors that she calls "The Bellows Falls Yacht Club." Of course she's been making Surrealist art since she was a teenager. What did you expect?

Listen to Wendy's Radio Show Archives Here: https://bit.ly/3VV4g4A and Here https://bit.ly/3HAx0eB

About the Event Image: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven 

One of the most controversial and radical women artists of her time, Baroness Elsa (1874-1927) was a groundbreaking Dada artist who created sound poetry, costumes and sculptural assemblages out of found objects. With a fierce and unflinching sense of humor, her work critiqued and challenged the bourgeoisie notions of feminine beauty and economic worth. She is now considered by many art historians to be the true creator of arguably the most influential and intellectually challenging art piece of the 20th century, Fountain, which is still attributed to Marcel Duchamp. Read more about this important (and hidden) chapter of art history: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchamp-fountain-women-art-history