Self-Introduced
Alternatively titled, ‘How I Planned It,’ this is a speech I once wrote and aimed to read.
Hello, my name is Elise. It’s lovely to be here and to meet all of you. Thank you for extending the opportunity to participate. My plan for the introduction is to walk you through my website and to talk a little about an initiative I’ve been developing called Centro that is intended to support ambitious projects—whether artistic, literary, or theoretical—that contribute to the interrogation of anthropocentric ways of seeing. Finally, I’ll share a piece of writing that I’ve been keeping in my pocket.
Let’s begin.
To share a little about myself, I grew up in North Austin and studied advertising at the University of Texas at Austin. My work has been exhibited in Lisbon, London, and Mexico City, and published in SAND Journal and Poet Lore, a poetry journal published biannually based in Maryland.
Here is a series titled Court that was finished in 2021. When it was published by SAND Journal, a Berlin-based literary and art journal, the art editor provided a write-up to accompany the series that I thought communicated my practice at the time and the intention behind the work.
The editor wrote, “The woodcuts that make up Elise’s series Court were created using offcuts from another work. The artist describes them as material and emotional negatives. Like photographic negatives, they have a kind of opacity; they point beyond themselves and make you wonder about the image that they could potentially reveal. And they’re visually intriguing in their own right. The marks and forms are both simple and inscrutable. They include everyday details, such as a toothbrush, and abstract shapes that look like broken maps of unknown cities. The artist describes the work as dealing with non-linear narratives and themes of identity and historical amnesia, and the blend of the everyday and the abstract evokes personal and social archeologies, about ways to unearth the unsaid and unsayable, by arranging and re-arranging its fragments. This is why I loved this work: its visual power in the use of leftover materials and the space it opens up to reflect on the potential of the leftovers of our lives.”
I can briefly show you the website for Centro, the initiative based in Beato. So far, there’s been a soft opening and a small discussion gathering that was held in a public park. The events are archived, if you’re interested in reading their descriptions.
After seeing that we were going to be reading the text “[title redacted]” and discussing the creative process as a working methodology, I thought this introduction would be a good moment to share segments of a piece I recently posted called “Outs and Ins (Ongoing),” in which a work of fiction becomes a personal essay, gets rejected, finds new breath as a journal entry, and could circle back.
This piece is formatted in a way that allows the writing, editing, and thinking process behind a short story, and the efforts I’ve made to formally publish it, to be witnessed.
I appreciate your attention. Does anyone have a problem with me cursing?
