Double Moon: Constructions & Conversations

(Paperback)

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Description

At the heart of Double Moon is a collaboration involving the complex interplay between two spirited minds. Each of Margo Klass's box constructions is an invitation to enter among objects in space and make of them what one might. Frank Soos has taken up that invitation. Margo's constructions and Frank's responses talk to each other, sometimes

Reviews

Open Double Moon and enter a temple of alcoves and altars to quiet restoration. Ordinary objects tell extraordinary stories. The world's orphaned items, fragments and forgotten stories are arranged in dignified contemplation. Long after you close this book a part of you will remain, kneeling at the altar of memory.

- Asia Freeman, artist and Director of Bunnell Street Gallery, Homer, Alaska

Shadow of egg. Idiom of stone. Music of branch. Band of sight. Texture of thought. The found objects find surprising new ways to tug at the eye and lure you in while the words, sometimes substantiation, sometimes pulling against the grain, have a momentum all their own. The visual and verbal pairings of Double Moon open windows on relationship, combine and recombine to expose the inscrutable world of imagination.

-- Judith Kitchen, author of Distance and Direction

This is a stunning book and I want to live in it. Double Moon -- one of the more magical collaborations ever encountered, amazing objects companioned by luminous words -- they meet, circle one another, interact and shimmer. Double Moon is a flight of many fancies, a truly transporting alliance by Klass & Soos -- meditative and whimsical, solid and quirky, calm and thoughtfully challenging, striking and deeply comforting -- all at once. The lucky viewer/reader wishes simply to be absorbed.

-Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Honey Bee: Poems & Short Prose

Author Bio

Illuminating five years of aesthetic sparring between two spirited minds, Double Moon is an artistic conversation between image and text. Klass uses found objects to create enigmatic, box constructions and Soos responds with insightful mini-essays that are sometimes ironic, sometimes whimsical, sometimes piercing. Klass's compositions of objects--such as scissors, paper, twigs--lead Soos to intimate contemplations on subjects such as love, loss, and place. Complex and simple simultaneously, the work challenges all who allow these mysterious images and words to unfold.

The tension inherent in these pairings is what sets the book apart from others. Tension is achieved through varying degrees of incongruity. Some of these pairings have considerable ironic distance between them, others are quite close. But in all, there is a tension that bounces the viewer/reader back and forth. Sometimes philosophical, sometimes humorous, Double Moon draws the viewer/reader close, even within the box, into quiet contemplation.

Klass keeps studios in Fairbanks, Alaska and Corea, Maine. Her work has been exhibited around the country. She recently received the Rasmuson Foundation Artist Award (waiting on offical wording). She taught art and art history in the Washington, DC area for many years and has recently been Artist-in-Residence at Denali National Park in Alaska. Soos is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction and a National Endowment on the Arts Fellowship. Klass and Soos began their collaboration while holding fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.