“How a quality isolate is lifted and moves away from the object into the flights and perchings of thought. One is furnished with ideas, according to the objects one converses with.”—Ada Smailbegović, “Of the Dense and Rare” 

Triple Canopy is pleased to present an evening with poet Ada Smailbegović and photographer Sylvia Hardy, who will investigate the material qualities of natural substances, written language, and the photograph. Smailbegović and Hardy are collaborating on “Of the Dense and Rare,” a digital project based on experimental procedures drawn from Francis Bacon’s 1623 treatise The History of Dense and Rare. The material substrates for their linguistic and physical experiments include gold cubes, rust, petroleum, powder of roses, sponge, as well as light, time, sentences, and metaphor. 

Infusing, dilating, sloughing, saturating, coagulating, Smailbegović performs Bacon’s experiments with the language of description as subject. Meanwhile, Hardy treats the very components of photographic and printing processes (light-sensitive paper, printer ink) as variables in her own experiments, at times mirroring or contradicting the state changes captured in her images. Join us for a reading, viewing, and discussion—of the manner in which matter folds and unfolds, an egg turns to stone, powders are pressed as close as possible, and droplets align along the surface of a membrane.

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