Joey Patrickt Goes Vispo (Oakland, California, USA)

[De Villo Sloan]

Mail art by IUOMA member Joey Patrickt (Oakland, California, USA)

June 15, 2014 - I have praised Joey Patrickt for his West Coast surrealism in previous blogs. In this posting, I recognize his versatility. He sent me a package of text-oriented pieces that match the MinXus-Lynxus visual poetry aesthetic perfectly. The piece above, for instance, uses overlays, disruption and distortion to reach the border between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, which is the realm of the asemic. I also like this postcard-size piece a great deal:

One section I like especially:

Joey Patrickt has disrupted the process of signification, logic and syntax to the extent that we are left to view the debris of language construction as a visual image; it cannot be “read” in a conventional way. But the ghost of language is insistent, and the shapes seem to be captured in a process of reforming into new symbols. Regardless of whether found, random or whatever the source, I believe this is a very effective concrete poem. The focus on a single line is a novel approach, and the smudging – the merging of the abstract signifiers with the physical page – certainly emphasize the materiality of the work. The piece is apparently a collab because I found this on the reverse side:

Joey Patrickt also enclosed some Trashpo related to the visual arts and writing:

The envelope:

And the reverse:

Many thanks to Joey Patrickt for an excellent textual-visual mail art package with some great conceptual material and some humor as well.