Jessy Randall & Briget Heidmous: ARTARIANICA
ARTARIANICA is the collaborative effort of Jessy Randall and Briget Heidmous. Jessy writes words. Briget draws.
Briget, born 1989, is an artist and creative entrepreneur. Her website is: www.briget-heidmous.com
Jessy, born 1969, has had poems and other things in McSweeney’s, Poetry, and The Best Experimental Writing. Her most recent book is How to Tell If You Are Human (Pleiades, 2018). Her website is http://bit.ly/JessyRandall.
Briget: Jessy and I co-founded ARTARIANICA in Special Collections at Colorado College in 2016 and we really didn’t know it. At the time Jessy was the Curator of Special Collections, and I was Assistant Curator of the InterDisciplinary Experimental Arts. I was responsible for tracking, documenting and maintaining a database on fine art objects in the Campus Collection. I went to the library to take inventory of objects in Jessy’s area, and while looking through the extensive lithograph travel poster collection together, we began talking about memory, moving through space and place, and the ephemerality of all things. That’s when we began to build this.
Jessy: As I recall, we went from a totally professional conversation to, for some reason, letting all our hair down and talking about some really personal stuff, kind of out of nowhere. Briget showed me some of the drawings she was doing at the time, and I brazenly asked if I could put words onto them. Amazingly, she agreed.
Briget: Jessy is right, I was so willing to glide right over that part, in the process of talking about memory we absolutely snowballed into a much more personal conversation. And, you know what, I’m glad Jessy boldly said she wanted to write on my drawings because this collaboration has opened tons of creative space for me.
Jessy: Over the next two years we tried starting with Briget’s drawings, starting with my words, reversing roles, and a few other things. I think we now have at least ten different kinds of things and about eighty things altogether and we keep thinking of other things to try.
Briget: Yeah, that’s the real beauty of ARTARIANICA.
Artarianica–Collaborative Effort of Jessy Randall and Briget Heidmous
Jessy Randall’s Fiction & Word Art at EIL
Something is Chasing You (above) is currently (February 1-23, 2019) on display in the exhibition Word Art: Works Inspired by Text at Cottonwood Center for the Arts.
Conversations about collaboration:
Jessy Randall and Daniel Shapiro
Jessy Randall on Daniel Shapiro
How the Potato Chip was Invented
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