Hey there, it’s summer – come get wavy! Join us at Glasgow’s Category Is bookshop to celebrate the launch of Anna Danielewicz’s new pamphlet, An Orca is Way Too Big to Attach, Unless as a JPEG – sizzling seafoam fresh from SPAMPress!
We’ll be kicking things off with readings from three exciting poets:
🐬 Anthony Daly
🐬 Felicity Anderson-Nathan .
🐬 Gloria Dawson
Followed by a reading by Anna herself.
Combining laconic loops and turns of millennial humour with bursts of minor devastation and sincerity, An Orca is Way Too Big to Attach, Unless as a JPEG records the everyday blisses and horrors of life in the present moment. While Danielewicz’s lines often capture the insouciant cool of Chelsea Minnis or the comic transcendence of Hera Lindsay Bird, you sense she’s as indebted to the lustrous arcades of seapunk, cereal packaging and WikiHow articles as she is to, say, a battered copy of post-internet anthology of I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best. There’s a soothing, oddly spiritual quality to An Orca is Way Too Big that makes you want to lie in a turquoise pool and count all the pixels in your iPhone to sleep. Nature and technology coexist in moments of occasional chiastic sublime (‘the sun was data transmitting’), and the ‘I’ is a kaleidoscope of cravings, rituals and observational tendencies; turning a page is genuinely like clicking refresh or adjusting the brightness of your screen. Lyric poems are interspersed with original illustrations, which take the familiar aesthetics of Instagram poetry into the khoratic space of the starburst or gradient, the spidery title. Exploring the existential dislocations of material culture alongside the invasive, affective recursions of pop relics (‘found it in a hopeless place, / did we, did we fuck’), An Orca Is Way too Big does the light work of a jpeg compression while keeping in mind the charismatic megafauna of its subjects. Like Walter Benjamin in avatar drag or Crispin Best stubbing his toe on Snapchat bathos, Anna Danielewicz might just be your favourite new flaneuse for Web 2.0. You’re all gonna want to get orca tattoos now.
~
Anna Danielewicz (born in Poland, 1991) is an artist based in Glasgow. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2016. Her most recent projects include Autocue at Intermedia Gallery, CCA Glasgow and Save the Death Star at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. She is currently working on a piece for the Edinburgh Art Festival and the Present Futures festival. Anna is a member of the programming committee of Market Gallery. Like many other people, in her heart of hearts she would rather be a whale.
The event is FREE, starts at 7 and finishes at 9. There will be cake, and also plenty of recent SPAM publications and merch for sale.
Some of us are heading to The Glad Café afterwards to celebrate with our friends at GoldFlakePaint, who just launched their third issue – feel free to join.
Please contact the lovely folks at Category Is if you have any queries re: accessibility etc :)
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