"Sick Paper Dolls" & "Categories"

Madison Phyper & Adrienne Gantenberg

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This mixed media project couples together Madison Phyper's poetry with Adrienne Gantenberg's visual art. Together, their work exposes quotidian dangers to a painfully surreal perspective.

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Yolk began as an electric conversation around a picnic table in Saint Henri Square.

Our scruffy pioneer and present prose editor had previously approached each of us with an idea, a vision: We would establish our own literary magazine in Montreal. And so it was, or so it would be. After that original encounter, eight individuals devoted to the word resolved that they would gather bi-weekly, on Sundays, and bring something new into this busy, manic world—something that might slow its spin down somewhat and cause its patronage to say: “You know what, it ain’t so bad, is it, Susan?”

We are undergraduate, graduate, and graduated students of writing. Some of us learn our craft formally from accomplished authors in seminar courses, and some of us learn by looking out the window of the world and onto the streets that sing below. Some of us learn from screaming squirrels, old curtains, departed grandfathers, and bowel movements. We learn from old lovers, long winters, imperfect mothers, and from the deep internet where a musical genius remains entombed.

Yolk is cold floors on Sabbath mornings, home-brewed ginger beer in the endless afternoon, and downpours of French-pressed coffee in assorted artisanal mugs. Our first official gathering was scheduled for a duration of two hours; most of us remained for six, departing only to attend to the summons of our own beckoning realities. Together, with time suspended, we talked endlessly of contributing something to disrupt Montreal’s literary ecosystem. Something unparalleled, something true.

But what? There was nothing to discuss. There was everything to discuss.

We volunteer our time, hounding some elusive beast composed of combustible words and works. We are hopeful, truly hopeful, that we can give something new, a new way, a new light, and that if we cannot, we might at least uphold the traditions of our predecessors, cast star-wide nets to capture their echoes. We are a thousand decisions. We are a sanctuary for the orphaned word, the solitary writer, the cereal-eating artist who yearns for company, for the comfort of a like mind; we sit together with them at foggy dawn, it rains a baptism, with our arms and hands intertwined, we form an umbrella—underneath, they scribble madly, the perfect picture.

Yolk in no way presumes to be superior to its contemporaries, but its contemporaries should not presume yolk to be anything other than loud—quite, quite loud. We are yippidy jazzed to address the oh-so-technicolorful magnificence of the human experience, but we are prepared also to address the ugliness, to stare at its wet, hairy snout and into its square depth and to roar in return at the things that yearn to devour our skin, beset our ethos, and dig graves in our own backyards.

There’s so much to say, there’s so much we don’t know, but together, with you, we can placate that ignorance, render it peaceful, tolerable, and perhaps even, fucking beautiful.

And Susan says, “Amen.”

Sick Paper Dolls

Artwork by Adrienne Gantenberg

Categories

Artwork by Adrienne Gantenberg





Madison is a Tkaronto (Toronto) born playwright currently living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) studying Performance Creation at Concordia University. She has just released her first collection of poetry titled "The Sexual Encounters of Caterpillars" which explores some of the sexual grey zones commonly experienced by pre-pubescent and adolescent females, and which seeks to develop a new language to express these often ineffable experiences. Madison is curious about how poetry may offer the potential to express that which is inexpressible in academic terms, and subsequently offers new forms of communication, expression, and liberation.

Adrienne Gantenberg is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Chicago. She has worked on many performing arts productions as a costume designer and her painting and paper collage work have been exhibited in the US, Canada, and Europe.  Her art displays a sense of embodiment and self-recognition through the expression of emotionally distorted perceptions and abstracted bodily representations, often exploring how we perceive our own bodies according to our own psychology. Influenced by Expressionism, Dada, and Art Brut, she adores the experimentation that is inherent in the fragmented process of collage.

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Additional reading

Beyond Control

Age of the Machine