Grids of precisely positioned artworks in the Joe’s Lounge gallery of Gibsons Public Art Gallery do more than evoke window panes: they invite viewers to peer through the gaps in their component parts, and experience illumination in omission.
Blackout poetry by Sechelt-based artist Tzaddi Gordon — her exhibition, titled Found In the Thick of It opened on Feb. 15 with a public reception — highlights specific words from pages of published text, teasing out new meanings. Surfaces are ornamented, collage-style using vintage illustrations, or with Gordon’s hand-painted imagery in ethereal acrylics.
It’s a long way from her art training at Emily Carr University, where she specialized in ceramic sculpture. “I’m not a confident painter,” she admitted, “but I’m much more confident now, just through this.” Her professional career in design revolves around website construction, a decidedly more restrictive discipline — especially when leading large teams for telecom providers.
“Digital and online work is a process where you’re solving problems,” she said. “It’s not really about me or my intent so much as the question of what problem you’re solving with design. Art is much more a heart-centered process for me, where I ask how the words on the page make me feel, whether they make me laugh or if they’re really touching.”
Gordon’s practice of blackout poetry began in 2019. She had previously browsed Austin Kleon’s 2010 book Newspaper Blackout, in which the cartoonist redacted text with a permanent marker to craft verse from workaday prose. At a local thrift shop, she found a thick-papered vintage book and began cutting its pages.
“I skimmed the page and there’d be something that jumped out at me,” she said. “I skimmed the page more and saw what other words I could connect to so it felt like a cohesive micro-story or a poem.”
One year later, her husband was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Increasingly, Gordon’s art had to take shape in the moments between caregiving responsibilities. The process of forming fragments into emotionally potent verse became a visceral metaphor for the losses that accompanied her husband’s condition. Unable to communicate the full spectrum of her inner life with her spouse, she channeled grief and frustration into her artwork.
In a series that begins with her framed poem All The Light, Gordon’s handpicked words take shape over cloud-like abstracts in dreamy blues: “All the light / made me remember and / be / very quiet for a jiffy.” Over swirling indigo vapours in her Heartache Lay Quietly series, Gordon expresses the weight of duty and its debilitating effect on dreams: “meeting a / responsibility / she could not / escape, / heartache / lay quietly.”
The GPAG show is Gordon’s first solo exhibition since her debut display of blackout poetry works at the Gumboot Café five years ago. “It’s come a long way since then,” she observed. Wry humour emerges alongside pathos in the compact frames. “I / was / resigned / to / tumbling in / the / show,” she writes in a work that combines antique typography with subversively manipulated woodcuts prints. Glimpses of mirrored text from the page’s opposite face occasionally bleed through, offering hints of significance that swept up in the act of metamorphosis.
Gordon published a guide to blackout poetry in 2023. This spring, she will clear space in her garage to make room for a return to three-dimensional sculpture. A book (or a series) featuring her constructed verse is also in the works. “Because I kind of separated myself from my emotions in the process [of supporting my husband], these projects keep me sane,” she said, “and they connect to my heart.”
Found In the Thick of It continues at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery until March 9, with Gordon making periodic appearances in Joe’s Lounge.
