Beyond the Looking Glass: Break, An Exhibition at Bennington College

Light, fractured glass, and poetry intertwine in verse-and-bullet-sidled shatterproof glass at Bennington College's latest exhibition. Break, a collaborative tapestry weaving the work of visual artist Katherine Jackson and poet David Weiss opens Wednesday, November 1, 2006 in the College's Usdan Gallery and will be on display until Saturday, December 2, 2006. This exhibition is free and open to the public.

Working with a sound artist and architect, Jackson and Weiss articulate their space using glass, text, video, and sound elements, exploring what the artists have described as the "break" a viewer experiences while looking through glass. Illustrating this experience, Jackson stitches luminous seams of Weiss' unexpected poetics using panels of LED illumination, and fractures pieces of shatterproof glass.

Jackson, a widely exhibited artist has based her work in New York, Boston, and London galleries, among others. With an initial career in literature, she later married her interests and began to employ visual technique to her work, rendering quirky, text-based images that eloped the rhythm of poetry and ascetics of visual art. Jackson has participated in international art projects and has collaborated with several poets, illustrating book covers and literary magazines.

David Weiss is a poet and an associate professor of English at Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges. He is the author of two collections of poems, The Pail of Steam (State Street Press Chapbooks, 1985) and The Fourth Part of the World (George Elliston Poetry Prize (1986) Ohio State University Press, 1986) and a novel, The Mensch (Mid List Press, 1998). His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Parnassus, Partisan Review, as well as several other periodicals.