by Sharon Vander Meer
Las Vegas Lit, a project of the Las Vegas Arts Council, presents featured writer Shereen Lobdell on Sunday, Jan. 26 at 4 p.m., at Gallery 140, 140 Bridge Street. Shereen will be talking about her experience with creating her collection entitled Visual Poetics, Poems and Photographs. She is just wrapping up her recent joint visual arts exhibit with Lauren Fath.
Shereen graduated with her MFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1992. She is a resident of Las Vegas, N.M. where she works full-time at New Mexico Highlands University as faculty in the Department of Art and Music.
Below is a Q&A with Shereen about her venture into creating a book of her photographs and poetry.
Q. What was your inspiration for the title?
A. The poems I wrote are directly responsive to places I visited and are accompanied by photographs I took in those places. I started the project by looking through my photo files and selecting interesting images. I then had the photos printed as 8x10s and began to work through them as resources for the poems.
Q. What were the deciding factors in selecting photos?
A. When I take photos while traveling, I take ordinary tourist photos, but I also take pictures that I refer to as ‘art’ shots. These art images are often fragments or close-ups of things that catch my attention. Once I edited and selected some as 8x10 prints, I looked through them and thought about what it was like to be there. I gathered impressions of sensory experience and emotional response, sometimes combining that with research.
Q. What led you to put poems and photos together?
A. When looking through my photos, the idea of journaling interested me. I never take the time to journal when I’m traveling, so I started thinking about what I would write in response to the photos. As I thought about this, I began to organize the writing into stanzas and realized I wanted to write poems about the images. I enjoy structure when writing poetry and decided on a 5-7-5 syllabic structure for my stanzas, loosely based on the Haiku tradition. I have heard this type of organization being referred to as American Haiku.
Q. What did you hope to accomplish?
A. My goal in working this way was to engage creatively with text in response to visual stimuli. The introduction of writing into my visual art production is not entirely new to me, and I have often experimented with words and phrases in decorating my ceramic artworks. When I was younger and in college, I worked extensively in art photography and worked as a darkroom technician. I hoped that returning to photography as a visual art form while incorporating the written word would produce something personal but also accessible and engaging.
Learn more about Shereen’s project at the Las Vegas Lit Featured Writer event, Sunday, Jan. 26, 4 p.m., Gallery 140, 140 Bridge Street, Las Vegas, NM.