mimesis: a visual poem | emily yost

Like much of my work, this hovers on the boundary between. What you are seeing is a marriage between image and text—a single image reconstructed, the metadata rewritten, parts deleted, rearranged—to mimic the degradation of memories over time. Studies suggest that the more we cling to fading memories, the more they are misremembered, willfully corrupted into something compatible with our current perspective. Desire clouds memory.

The photographic composition is simple: an upturned jawline against a wall painted pastel cyan by the fading winter light, a single nostril, a small constellation of acne tucked next to an ear, a birth mark where I’d sink my teeth, mousy brown hair cropped short, and two eyelashes silhouetted. Though I can only softly remember the quiet afternoon some years ago, this image continues to tug at me. I returned again and again to the surface of the text, shuffling the body parts around, dismembering, decapitating, copying and pasting pieces of the poem to create these disassociated reconstructions. The images become onomatopoetic, lulling the viewer with their internal rhythms, the repeating, faintly emerging forms acting as slant rhymes, dissonant yet connected.

mimesis (1)

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emily yost is an erotica artist and graduate from the school of visual arts living and working in brooklyn. a hybrid of writing and deconstructions of lens-mediated imagery, her works draws from poetry, synesthesia, twitter, and strange dreams, and explores the fluctuating relationship between memory, image, and language. you can find her here: www.emilyyost.com // @emily_why

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