Inspired by personal ads in a mid-century magazine, visual artist Ligia Bouton and poet Matt Donovan have created Missing Department, the first exhibition of the 2023-24 season at the Tower Fine Arts Center Gallery at SUNY Brockport The exhibition will run from September 14 through October 8 in the Gallery, located at 180 Holley Street, Brockport. The show is free and open to the public. Gallery hours for this exhibition are Monday through Friday, noon to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 14, at 4 p.m.
From 1919 to 1949 the pulp magazine Western Story published ads in the “Missing Department,” similar to today’s “Missed Connections” ads. According to Bouton, the cowboy stories that were the highlight of the magazine would give way to “poignant and humanized expressions of longing, forgiveness, connection, and redemption, with each small group of sentences alluding to narratives of loss and hope, of runaway and abandoned children, vanished spouses and separated lovers, of relationships pulled apart by jealousy, trauma, two world wars, and even whim.”
According to Bouton, during the pandemic, she created “drawings, paintings, and collages on the original paper of the magazine’s issue as a means of exploring the ad’s content,” while Donovan created poems drawn from “an enacted erasure of one the magazine’s pulp western stories. In this way, the collaborative artist and writer team create – through elaborate interventions with both the magazine’s pages and the language of its fiction – complex diptychs that interrogate human desire and loss.”
The exhibition will launch a book version of the project. In a related event, on October 4, Donovan will be reading from his 2022 collection The Dug-Up Gun Museum in Brockport’s esteemed Writer’s Forum.
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