Jean LaBlanc
Hint Offerings
Prints || Collage || Asemics
|
Bio: Jean LeBlanc grew up in Massachusetts midway between Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson. After moving to northwestern New Jersey in 1994, she taught college writing and literature for twenty-five years. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and in twelve collections, most recently Terrible Terrain: Poems Inspired by the Life of Lavinia Dickinson (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2023). A vibrant local poetry community keeps her inspired, especially the Writers' Roundtable of Sussex County, New Jersey, and the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center (of which she is a past director). She has exhibited artwork and photography in several juried shows and had visual work in journals. She was also a featured artist in The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly (Aqueduct Press, 2019). On Facebook, she's Jean LeBlanc Poetry. |
|
|
|
Artist Statement:
The interplay of literal and figurative is the key to the transformative power of literature and art. Metaphor, paradox, catachresis, pleonasm, anthimeria - all these rhetorical devices have visual parallels in my collage, print, multimedia, and asemic works. I especially love synecdoche, a part of something representing the whole, a hint offering a way into multiple possibilities. Synecdoche encourages astonishment. Asemic writing-itself like an extended synecdoche- adds the suggestion of a narrative while giving the reader/viewer space to see their own stories.
The interplay of literal and figurative is the key to the transformative power of literature and art. Metaphor, paradox, catachresis, pleonasm, anthimeria - all these rhetorical devices have visual parallels in my collage, print, multimedia, and asemic works. I especially love synecdoche, a part of something representing the whole, a hint offering a way into multiple possibilities. Synecdoche encourages astonishment. Asemic writing-itself like an extended synecdoche- adds the suggestion of a narrative while giving the reader/viewer space to see their own stories.
I think of each print/collage/asemic work I create as a visual poem. Likewise, as a poet, I consider many of my poems to be a sort of verbal collage or multi-layered monoprint (without the thrill of splattering paint everywhere). For the brief interval of creation-whether it's a poem, a collage, a print, an asemic text, or some combination of those forms-I can bring to the forefront that which is beautiful and life-enhancing, while diminishing that which would diminish me (diminish us). I hope that, for each reader/viewer, my work is a portal to a better world. With shape and color, subject matter and abstraction, semantic and asemic, we can explore new ways of seeing.