Amy Lam’s Baby Book with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Marvin Luvualu António,
Fan Wu, and New Chance
Sunday, May 14, 3-5PM
In gallery and livestream via drip-drop.tv
“God is personal,” the astrologer said.
Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.
Amy Lam launches her debut book of poetry, Baby Book (Brick Books), in the company of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Marvin Luvualu Antonio, and Fan Wu, with music by New Chance and floral arrangements by GUNNAR.
Praised by Rinaldo Walcott as “poems and a poetics of ethics,” Baby Book explores how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Describing the vivid tactility of growth and death—how everything is constantly, painfully remade—Lam offers a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance.
The hybrid event will be live-streamed on drip-drop.tv, premiering a new platform by Lam and Oliver Husain, with sound design by Matt Smith.
Order Baby Book from Brick Books or pick up a signed copy at the launch from Another Story Bookshop.
Light refreshments will be served with a bar.
No registration required.
Auto-generated captions will be available through the livestream.
*Please note*
Guests are encouraged to arrive early as seating is limited. The program and live stream will promptly starts at 3:10 PM with a performance by New Chance.
Guests are requested to wear a mask for this event.
Image courtesy of the artist.
__
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. From 2006 to 2020 she was part of the duo Life of a Craphead. Her solo exhibition a small but comfy house and maybe a dog is currently open at the Richmond Art Gallery, BC. Baby Book is her first collection of poetry. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.
Fan Wu is a poet, performer, and catharsis fiend who oscillates mildly between the love of one and the One of love. His current work pulls a constellation of figures together—including Zhuangzi, Bataille, Tsai Ming-liang, and Leslie Scalapino—to forge a poethics of immanence that favours process over productivity, mystical suspension over knowledge attainment, and life as it's lived over empty abstract transcendentals. You can read his work online in MICE Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Capilano Review, C Magazine, and Pleasure Dome.
B. 1986, St.Petersburg, Russia, Marvin Luvualu António is an Angolan-Canadian visual artist whose interdisciplinary work explores but is not limited to the topics of looking, identify politics and the artist as subject.
Matt Smith is a Toronto-based sound designer, focused on immersive and complex multi-speaker spatialized sound installations. In recent years, he has designed multiple shows for the companies The Toronto Dance Theatre, Bad New Days, and for choreographers Andrea Spaziani and Amanda Acorn. Smith also engineers mixes and masters. He has a music practice under the moniker, Prince Nifty. He is a Grammy-nominated producer and musician working with artists such as Lido Pimienta, Caribou, Bernice, Scott Hardware, Nick Storring etc. The new Prince Nifty record, Interplanetary Machines, assembling madrigals based on dream texts of u.f.o.’s from analysands of Carl Jung, was released in June 2022.
Born in Beijing, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Hello, the Roses; Empathy; and I Love Artists. Her collection A Treatise on Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, PEN Open Book Award, and Kingsley Tufts Prize. In 2021, she won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry for her lifetime contributions to American Poetry. Plant Thought, a collaboration with artists Kiki Smith and Richard Tuttle is forthcoming from The Center for Book Arts.
New Chance is a Toronto-based producer and vocalist. Her work in music includes DJing, remixing, scoring for film and video, and a long-time collaborative practice in contemporary dance. Recent projects include performing on tour with Justine Chambers and Laurie Young’s choreographic work, One Hundred More, composing for Aisha Sasha John’s Diana Ross Dream, producing with Picastro’s Liz Hysen and musical collaboration with reggae legend Willi Williams. Her voice and songwriting have appeared on recent records by Lee Paradise, Isla Craig, LCON, Miszczyk, Chandra, and Jennifer Castle. In 2021, New Chance released her full-length LP, Real Time (We Are Time). She is currently developing new modes of personal musical practice as part of a Canada Council-funded research project on the ancient Greek philosophical concept of The Metakosmia.
Oliver Husain is an artist and filmmaker. His projects often begin with fragments of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects — to animate his research and fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups. Currently, his work is being shown in the exhibitions Lenticoolers at Gallery Susan Hobbs, Toronto; and I don’t know you like that at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries.