The Woven Tale Press Selected Works &The Empty Spaces Project Gallery Exhibit by Sandra Tyler

Sandra Tyler

The Woven Tale Press Selected Works &The Empty Spaces Project Gallery Exhibit

Sandra Tyler, editor (anthology)

The Woven Tale Press is an online literary and fine arts magazine, and this is the editors’ first printed edition of selected works. The intent of this selection is to represent the diversity of past contributors to the magazine–rather than the “best,” the eclectic. Monthly for their magazine, the Press editors seek to cull diverse talents from cyberspace, to highlight the story or poem otherwise buried in a blogger’s archive; the painting, sculpture or photograph from an artist’s site worthy of greater focus than its singular Web page. To grow traffic to these noteworthy talents across the World Wide Web, the Press credits its contributors with interactive urls back to their blogs or websites. The Woven Tale Press and The Empty Spaces Project (http://www.theemptyspacesproject.org) share a similar mission in their collaboration of a book and gallery exhibit: to champion the arts and cultivate community, for the gallery locally and nationally, for the Press, across the World Wide Web. The Empty Spaces Project founders, Ann Monteiro and Paul Toussaint, used the irresistible charm of the downtown Putnam, Connecticut, as their backdrop to morph an eye-sore of a gutted and vacant storefront into a dynamic art gallery. The Empty Spaces Project is a 501(c)3 organization that promotes alternative arts programming in the Northeastern Connecticut region. By sponsoring multidisciplinary arts exhibitions, the Project seeks to revitalize communities through renewed business investment, increased tourism, and sustainable programs. And while The Empty Spaces Project gallery serves as a hub to draw art lovers into the city of Putnam, The Woven Tale Press site serves as a hub for the creative on the Web, offering, in addition to its magazine, Press membership and weekly features on the arts. The Press editors and Toussaint, an iPhoneographer, began their collaboration after Toussaint’s own work was featured in the magazine. In December of 2015, The Empty Spaces Project sponsored A Woven Tale Press Selected Works exhibition featuring artists in this book.

Reviews

In collaboration with the Empty Spaces Project, a nonprofit art gallery in Putnam, Conn., the editors of Woven Tale Press compile favorite images and writings (including poems, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction) from Woven Tale’s online magazine. . This multimedia offering is part exhibit catalog and part (printed) e-zine, and it successfully conveys these interdisciplinary efforts in book form. For the most part, the colorful, often wacky artwork is more appealing than the writing. The mixed-media efforts are the most eye-catching. Highlights include Donald Kolberg’s steel mesh sculptures, which incorporate each figure’s own shadow as a design element; Boisali Biswas’s woven fiery fiber art entitled “Summer Has Passed”; and Daniel Wiener’s colorful hanging sculptures of plastic, wire, Sculpey, and acrylic paint. Another fine art standout is Joan Giordano’s “Fantasy Journey,” a collage of newspapers, lithography, graphite and paint, with archival images bleeding onto vintage wallpaper printed over with ghostly floral designs. Christine Kalafus’s short essay, “Confessions of a Makeup Addict,” is reassuringly honest and entertaining, and Kelly Garriott Waite’s similarly honest short story “Something Extraordinary” is also noteworthy. Color illus. (BookLife)

Kirkus Review

KIRKUS REVIEW

New York Times Notable Book author Tyler (Blue Glass, 2014, etc.) and her editorial team of artists and writers present an eclectic collection of artwork and creative writing.

Two arts organizations team up for this exhibition catalog and writing anthology. Woven Tale Press publishes a monthly “cyber magazine” that gathers both graphic art and prose from many different websites. The book at hand presents a selection of writings that appeared in the e-zine during 2015, selected by Tyler and her editorial team, and pieces from a show of visual artists that opened in December 2015 at the Empty Spaces Project Gallery in the small, progressive town of Putnam, Connecticut. The collection offers a broad array of work in different media by midcareer artists. Each feature presents a short artist’s statement, along with images representing his or her work, which vary widely in style. Amagansett, New York–based painter Elizabeth Sloan Tyler’s large, abstract canvases portray the ever-changing coastal light through translucent layering of subtle colors. Photographer Paul Toussaint, who also manages Empty Spaces, presents image collages that feature disquieting or pensive faces. The pieces of flash fiction and poetry that the editors have chosen often exemplify the wandering evanescence of much blog-based work. “Scraped, scored and scratched, / minor vacuum of the sky crossed out / with a memory of vapour, debris,” writes poet Colin Dardis in “Comet.” However, native Ohioan Kelly Garriott Waite’s tautly written story “Something Extraordinary,” about a girl and her tooth, shows a genuine mastery of the short-short fiction genre: “As she watched the gravy bleed into her corn, Louisa realized that missing teeth were painful truths.” The book’s blend of complex purposes, genres, and media proves the difficulty of clearly conveying these aesthetic offerings in a stand-alone book. However, it serves as a rich catalog for the gallery and press whose combined efforts produced these works.

An engaging fusion of print and the Web, featuring works by experienced artists and writers seeking a greater audience.

Pub Date: Feb. 29th, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-9911024-2-6

Page count: 138pp

Publisher: The Woven Tale Press

Program: Kirkus Indie

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