Press Release Poems, by Christopher Schreck

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Press Release Poems is a collection of works composed of fragments culled from press releases for contemporary art exhibitions. The author scanned hundreds of texts, selecting words and short phrases that stood out for their conventionality (particularly in the context of institutional “artspeak” jargon or International Art English), informality, or rhetorical license. These remnants were then gathered and assembled into new compositions, interwoven with the author’s own lines and connective passages.

Formally, the work is experimental in both its strategy and its use of whitespace. Like a physical collage, each poem makes its process visible, with Schreck’s cut-and-paste methods articulated through line breaks and capitalizations preserved from the source material. But though born of a conceptual exercise, the results are linear and lyrical, unfolding as lucid, image-driven sequences that explore recurring motifs like convalescence, biological modification, digital entanglement, speculative materiality, and self-revision.

Christopher Schreck is an artist, writer, and musician. A former editor of KALEIDOSCOPE Magazine, his writing on art and culture has appeared in publications like Aperture, Mousse, Sex, and CURA., as well as in numerous artist monographs. He currently hosts two conversation-based podcast series showcasing the art and design communities of New York and Los Angeles (Abundance Zine and Motion in Field, the latter produced with Marta Gallery LA); he is also readying the launch of a limited-series podcast based on Art Damaged, his longstanding research project documenting the impairment and destruction of artworks in formal exhibition settings. His first collection of poetry, Burnt Grass, was published by Shelter Press.