By Erin Brock
Everyone loves cake, so why wouldn’t everyone love a book with paintings of cake as well as poems to accompany them?
Two local artists, poet Carrie Green and painter Lori Larusso, have worked together in order to produce It’s Not My Birthday, That’s Not My Cake. The chapbook consists of 12 poems and paintings of cakes. While the paintings focus on the physical presence of the cake and its surroundings, Green’s poems delve deeper into the social and psychological contexts of the cakes.
“This body of work was realized using found and appropriated imagery, and the flat image lends itself to intentionality of mark making. Representations of generic and stereotypical middle America are reminding us of the culture we maintain on a daily basis through our every action,” Larusso said. “Very often, our ideals are a reflection of the way we wish things were, rather than a product of the way we actually experience them. I find this conflict to be in direct connection to the representational image.”
Despite the deeper meaning of the work, the project comes packaged in an enjoyable format which the artists hope will encourage the interests of a varied audience.
“Many people find poetry and visual art daunting. Cake is not daunting. We hope that our subject matter allows people to experience art forms they might not otherwise engage with,” Green said.
Green’s work has been published in several prestigious journals, and Larusso has showed her artwork all over the nation, but neither had ever participated in a collaboration of this scale before.
“Our goals included reaching a wider audience, and also to partake in the experiment of this collaboration. We had never worked together before, and neither of us had done too many collaborative works in the past, so it seemed like it would be a unique experience,” Larusso said. “We hope to reach a variety of readers, art appreciators, and pop culture seekers, as well as cake lovers, and really, anyone who has any interest in reading poetry or looking at artwork, or exploring cultural constructs, feminism, women’s personal lives, Americana, or domesticity, to name a few.”
Green also hopes that the chapbook is successful on several fronts.
“We had several goals in publishing this work. We wanted to raise awareness of the ways women have exerted creativity through traditional female domestic arts such as baking cakes, to affirm the power of women collaborating to make art, and to make art personal and portable,” Green said.
The project was made possible by the Artist Enrichment Grant through the Kentucky Foundation for Women, an organization which serves to promote women’s expression through the arts.
“There are very few publishers who produce multimedia chapbooks. The grant we received from the Kentucky Foundation for Women allowed us to publish this chapbook in a meaningful and artistic way, and to make it affordable to our audience,” Green said.
It’s Not My Birthday, That’s Not My Cake will be released on September 22, 2011 at Green and Larusso’s chapbook release party at Mulberry & Lime, off of North Limestone. But the events don’t end there. Green will have a reading at Poor Richard’s Books in Frankfort on October 9 as a part of Second Sunday, and both Larusso and Green will be present at the Little/Gaines Artist Series at the University of Kentucky’s Little Fine Arts Library for a reading and presentation on December 6.
For more information on the chapbook, go to http://notmycake.com/chapbook.
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