Rachel J. Webster & Josh Honn Readings at the Closing Reception for Treatments, 2019/2023
NEWS
NEWS: Bridge Books Announces Closing Reception & Readings on Tuesday, May 16, from 6-8PM by Rachel J. Webster & Josh Honn in support of Mat Rappaport’s Photography Anthology “Treatments 2019-2023,” Published to Accompany the Exhibition at Material, Chicago
Copies of the anthology will be available for purchase at the reception, or you can order online here.
TREATMENTS: CLOSING RECEPTION & READINGS
On Tuesday, May 16th from 6-8pm Material, Chicago will host a closing reception for Treatments 2019 / 2023 and readings by Rachel J. Webster and Josh Honn of poetry included in the book of the same name. Published to accompany the exhibition, Webster's The Well: Grief Poems and Honn’s A Slow Archive, each included in the Bridge Books release of Treatments, offer poetic responses to the early loss of their spouses to illness. Both readings will be video recorded live and entered into the Readings Archive after the event.
"These poems were written after the death of my partner,” says Webster. “I had cared for him through his long illness and decline from ALS, and afterward, I found myself the single mother of our small child. That was such a difficult time in my life — groundless, unexpected. and shot-through with a pained, radiant awareness that I carry to this day. I am excited to put these poems into conversation with Mat Rappaport's haunting photos and this writing by Josh Honn."
Mat Rappaport's Treatments is a deeply personal poetic meditation on illness, institutional space, and loss, documenting a body of photographic and installation works created over a two year timespan.
“This book collects some of the most challenging work I have made, and while difficult, it is a privilege to share and put it out in the world.” says Rappaport.” Treatments detail my observations of institutional spaces while navigating my partner’s experience with cancer. The journey coincided with our shared trauma of covid, during which she endured surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles.”
“I know readers will be enthralled with this as a photography collection.” says Bridge Books publisher Michael Workman. “It recalls for me the institutional documentation of Mary Ellen Marks’ Ward 81, the objects of the institutional space captured here in a way only glimpsed between the frames in that artist’s series, which were mostly portraits. A perfectly tidy lunch tray and salt shaker here become the silver half-dome security mirror, the errant red wall outlet alongside the waiting room portraits of the art framed and hung for patients, often with messages of perseverance or similar up-lifting message.
“I think this work is deeply profound, and stands up not only as a study of an artist’s response to the suffering and grief we all experience, or how art can be a way of coping, but in this series of images, how art is a necessary and natural subject for response to it, too. I think Rachel J. Webster’s poetry moves seamlessly between the frames to evoke, as evidenced in the exhibition photos, how the process of living through grief can itself become both monument and memorial.
“I was honored to curate this work together with Mat for Material, the exhibition space directed by Jean Frater April 16 - May 14, 2023 and for Bridge Books to publish this catalog and artist’s book.”
About Rachel J. Webster
Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family, (Henry Holt, 2023) — a book of creative nonfiction that explores ancestry, race, gender, and justice in American history. Rachel has also published four books of poetry, including, Mary is a River which was a finalist for the 2014 National Poetry Series; September: Poems; The Endless Unbegun; and The Sea Came Up & Drowned, which combines erasure poems and Rachel’s collage artwork to meditate on our extractive economy and fractured relationship to the earth. Rachel’s poems and essays often appear in anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Tin House, and The Yale Review. Rachel has been a Fellow in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; an Op-Ed Public Voices Fellow; Winner of an American Association of University Women Award; a member of Phi Beta Kappa; and a recipient of Emerging Artist Awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Poetry Center of Chicago. She teaches Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
About Josh Honn
Josh Honn is a librarian, writer, photographer, bird watcher, and abolitionist living in Rogers Park, Chicago. He is the author of the self-published chapbook A Slow Archive (2015) and the essay "How Tall a Shadow You Can Make: Ross D. Brown, Historical Memory, and Archives of Care" (2018), which can be found online. His work has appeared in Asymptote, Entropy, and Zócalo.
About Mat Rappaport
Mat Rappaport is an artist and filmmaker known for works that utilize mobile video, performance, and photography to explore habitation, mass-tourism, perception, and power as related to built environments. Recent projects include the Range Mobile Lab (RML) performances employing a 1995 GMC step van, augmented with external cameras that capture video from the surrounding environment and then projects the video onto the windows as the RML navigates the city. The Range Mobile Lab supports media performances, architectural collaborations, and direct community engagement. The RML continues Mat Rappaport’s effort to shape the experience of urban environments through media-based interventions. In 2022 Rappaport completed the feature documentary, touristic intents, which asks, “can a building be guilty?” by exploring the redevelopment of the Nazi resort in Prora, Germany.
Rappaport’s work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally in museums, galleries, film festivals, and public spaces. Recent projects have been featured during EXPO Chicago, the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2019 and 2017, Anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, Italy, and 2018 Ann Arbor Film Festival and performances with the Range Mobile Lab at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Block Museum at Northwestern University.
Rappaport is an Associate Professor in Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College in Chicago.
About Bridge Books
LAUNCHED IN 2022, Bridge Books was founded with the belief that books are the vascular systems of democracy, delivering the intellectual oxygen required for a body politic to actively, inclusively, effectively self-govern and thrive. Bridge Books strives to provide that oxygen through publication of interventionist titles in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, architecture, dance, couture, cinema, photography, and the broad spectrum other artistic disciplines and related interests as defined by the concerns of the Bridge collective of artists, including work by its members, as well as new, relevant and vital voices when encountered.
