Skip to content Skip to footer links

Poetry &

Poetry &: Basic Needs with Vanessa Jimenez Gabb and Misha Tyutyunik

Saturday, April 30, 2022, 6 pm, Dia Chelsea

Saturday, April 30, 2022, 6 pm, Dia Chelsea

Free. Register for the event here.

Overview

For the second installment of Poetry &, join us on the eve of May Day and the last day of National Poetry Month for Basic Needs, an immersive experience that reimagines the interplay of image, text, and sound. Through selected works re-created visually and aurally from the poetry collection Basic Needs (2021)by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb and a portion of The Guiding Dark (2018), a painted-lightbox series by Misha Tyutyunik (on view in Dia Chelseas talk space, April 27–30), you are invited to celebrate love, the labor behind it, and the light it creates.

Vanessa  Jimenez Gabb was born in Brooklyn in 1983. She is the author of the poetry collections Basic Needs (2021) and Images for Radical Politics (2016). She received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn.  

Misha Tyutyunik was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1984. He is a painter, muralist, street artist, and illustrator. A graduate of Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and a Fulbright Scholar, Tyutyunik balances corporate commissions, studio practice, and community-based public art projects. He lives in Brooklyn. 

Misha Tyutyunik’s series of lightboxes The Guiding Dark (2018) creates passageways into other worlds. United by a focus on metaphorical darkness and associated notions of light, the works use imagery and techniques from the ancient world to the present to consider what the artist calls “the truth of consciousness.” Through their bold graphic sensibility and redeployment of historical motifs, coupled with the contemporary medium of the lightbox, The Guiding Dark series reveals the timelessness of colorful, sensuous forms used to illustrate ideas of love and community.   

On view as part of Poetry &: Basic Needs with Vanessa Jimenez Gabb and Misha Tyutyunik, the lightboxes create a fitting setting for the artists’ collaborative event on Saturday, April 30the eve of May Day and the last day of National Poetry Month. Taking its title from Jimenez Gabbs 2021 poetry collection, Basic Needs explores love and its relationship to labor. For this event, visitors are immersed in audio and visuals from the book, which combines poems about the nineteenth-century fight for an eight-hour workday with more contemporary portrayals of how love can mitigate and at times supersede the overwhelming everyday anxieties brought about by capitalism. The structure of the event reflects Jimenez Gabb’s and Tyutyunik’s long-standing partnership and, more broadly, the historical strategy of individuals’ banding together to co-determine a vision of the future. For Basic Needs, the audience is invited to respond visually, verbally, and in writing through making a collective poem during the course of the evening. 

floorplan
  1. Falling Beyond, 2018 
    Acrylic spray paint, birch, Plexiglas, and LED light strip 
    Courtesy the artist
  2. Pieces of You, 2018 
    Acrylic spray paint, birch, Plexiglas, and LED light strip 
    Courtesy the artist
  3. The Dawn Exhales, 2018 
    Acrylic spray paint, birch, Plexiglas, and LED light strip 
    Courtesy the artist
  4. A Topography of Guilt, 2018 
    Acrylic spray paint, birch, Plexiglas, and LED light strip 
    Courtesy the artist
  5. And the Whisper of Dandelions, 2018 
    Acrylic spray paint, birch, Plexiglas, and LED light strip 
    Courtesy the artist
  6. Of Tamed Shadows, 2018 
    Acrylic spray paint, birch, Plexiglas, and LED light strip 
    Courtesy the artist

now that you’ve arrived 

by the lighted path 

listened looked and felt 

please use a pen 

to respond  

in your own language 

our canvas 

our poem 

our labor 

our love 

Books

Citizen Illegal

“Citizen Illegal is right on time, bringing both empathy and searing critique to the fore as a nation debates the very humanity of the people who built it.” ―Eve Ewing, author of Electric Arches

View details

Get Dia News

Receive Dia News and be the first to hear about events and exhibitions happening at our locations and sites.