VERSO / vol. 7 is a new form of sharing art and culture. Each month we’ll curate contributions of writing, poetry and visual art packaged along with personalized editorials and deliver them monthly.

We’re happy to share editorials and photos of already shipped packages with you here.

Dearest Reader/Dearest Red,

From the titular Ruby to the red screwdriver employed in Scratch our faces, the threads of thought and hue evoked by both Shertise Solano and Simone Zeefuik in their interplays between art and experience are resonant with one another, and with the reclamations, tellings and accountabilities that direct and focus the work in this month’s VERSO /. Taking place in the junctures where art serves as witness, holds space and interrogates its own medium and makers, the material is alert and authentic in what it notices and in what it actions and gestures toward in its visual cues, enigmas and contemplations.

From Solano’s deliberate scratchings to Zeefuik’s heist-in-progress, it is work that compels embodied awareness as a reader, listener, viewer. Our attention is drawn to faces, skin and scar, to earlobe, cheek, and shoulder. To the shoes on our feet, to the blood in our veins. We finetune lipstick, feel sun break through flesh. We step outside time and into the stories. Into what is discerning and revelatory, into Solano’s new existence of enlightenment in which we don’t turn aside from violence or stigma, where we acknowledge pain and injustice and exclusion; where we don’t reconcile what cannot be reconciled or redact our responses or annotate our villains into what we can comfortably justify.

Both Zeefuik and Solano signal to the vigilance required to dismantle oppressive and racist institutions and systems, and to places of rest, gratitude that feed resilience and joy. As such,
B (Ruby) and Somi enact a watch, keeping time to the minute and allowing Zeefuik to wield her craft as a storyteller in a delightful invention of what she, as the writer, wants to revel in. In Solano’s faces and frames, we are beseeched by a sense of memory and grief, by song and by light, by the language of her imagery, and in an art activism we can understand as “a practice aimed at generating a/effect: emotionally resonant experiences that lead to measurable shifts in power” [- the Center for Artistic Activism].

I recently visited the Autry Museum in Los Angeles to see When I Remember I See Red, an exhibit curated by the late Frank LaPena and borrowing its title from bell hooks. In the exhibit, the convergence of race, remembrance, and identity leans into art as one of the ways to decolonize our communities. From scarlet convocations to leached assemblages and intricately beautiful considerations, the artwork and installations in this collection gather what has been lost through generations of genocide and ongoing violence against indigenous peoples and land. Channeling ancestral voices and contemporary perspectives, red meets the devastation and redresses the world.

Shertise Solano

Simone Zeefuik

As Ruby and her accomplices head off on their take down, and as scratches heal over into scar, I can imagine stage directions that read The lights fade to red. In this flood of color, there is blood spilled, red flag warnings, emergency alerts, forbidden fruits, root chakras, beating hearts and our strongest, deepest passions stirring. And in this crescendo of feeling, there are shifts and (re) alignments, occasions of the villains within, and myriad outcomes of light. Enjoy them all.

Best,

Jennifer M. Arcuni