Nance Van Winckel is a decorated poet and fiction writer with almost as many books as fingers, but in our upcoming issue she blends poetry with visual art to create what she calls “photoems.” Her breathtaking digital photo-collages draw from the traditions of urban landscape photography, collage, mural, and graffiti. Of her process, she says, “I begin with a digital photo I’ve taken. Then, via Photoshop, I add other images I have created, e.g., black & white images I’ve Xeroxed out of 1930’s sixth-grade textbooks, hand-colored, and scanned back in. Then I add small bits of my own text—mini-poems, if you will.”
In CR 9.2, we showcase Van Winckel’s work in photographs of blighted urban buildings, which Van Winckel digitally alters both graphically and poetically. As her artist statement says, “Of these facades there seem endless ways poetry might intersect with/become/mash-up against graffiti.”
Here, Van Winckel applies this same aesthetic practice to train cars, creating a series of photo-collages set to music: “When You Need a Train It Never Comes” by alt-country musician Amanda Shires. She says: “These incorporate, like the building facades I’ve graffitied in this issue, small bits of text and graphic alterations. I haven’t quit poetry; I’m just putting it on walls, and trains!”
