Spoken and visual art brought together at the Coalesce exhibition

The Coalesce Exhibition, held at the Eno Arts Mill Gallery and operated by the Orange County Arts Commission, is a collaborative project between poets and visual artists that will run through the end of January. Morrow Dowdle, poet and arts organizer and Max Dowdle, visual artist, are the co-originators and co-curators for the Coalesce project. 

 Designed as a creative exercise, a group of selected poets and artists within the Commission collaborate to create pieces which communicate and expand on one another. 

This all took place during a dinner hosted by the Arts Commission, where artists and poets exhibited their work. After getting to know one another, the poets were asked to rank which visual artist they would like to work with, and the artists were asked the same. 

After being paired, the poets and artists exchanged pieces, which they then used as inspiration to create their own original works. 

“It really lended itself to such a creative challenge of being inspired by someone else's work and being able to riff off of that and then really put your own spin on it through your visual art,” Kate Kryder, one of the artists, said.

Kryder was paired with poet Cassidy Englund. The two agreed to only communicate a handful of times during the whole process and agreed to keep the final product a surprise for each other. 

The exhibit requires that artists create something with a rigid prompt — something they must adhere to — placed upon them by their partner. Kryder said that this exhibit challenged her creatively and took her outside her comfort zone, which was especially important as she has recently decided to dedicate more time to her creative pursuits. 

For Englund, it was surprising to see what Kryder took as the main focus of their poem. Englund enjoys the ekphrastic form — arts-based poetry. For them, this experience was the first time someone took their work and looked at it using the same lens they do to create their poems. 

“It was just a cool way to get a more holistic look at the language between poetry and visual art and to see the whole process take place,” Englund said. 

For visual artists, everything must be said implicitly through the colors, images or techniques used. Some works are more overt than others, but this exhibit allowed for a clear voice to be attached to the work through the poems, and vise versa through visual art. 

“I had a certain kind of inspiration behind it, but then to hear it come to life and come off the page was just so special,” Kryder said. 

As viewers and patrons of the arts, this exhibit is a wonderful opportunity to see the creative capabilities of local artists and be inspired by their work. 

Elizabeth Hart, an exhibit attendee, particularly enjoyed exploring the relationship between visual and written art — specifically, how these artists communicated with each other through their works and told stories or brought them to life. 

“I feel like it just turns on a different part of my brain," Hart said. "That feels really good, especially when you're in the trenches of working parenthood."

Hart was accompanied by her friend Sara Hammond, enhancing the experience by having two inspecting sets of eyes. Hammond said that it allowed them to notice things the other usually wouldn't. 

The exhibition itself was a singular room with the walls decorated with poems and their accompanying paintings, photos or sculptures. One of the artworks was a life-size queen-like statue that caught the curious eyes of Hammond and Hart. 

This exhibit was an opportunity for artists to connect and for the community to as well. Events like these drive the collaborative nature of creating art, Englund said. 

“In American culture, there's such individualism and, almost a selfishness to it, and I think that we need to — people in general — I think need to loosen their grip on that idea just a little bit,” she said. “I don't think they need to totally let it go, but I think that doing things like this and being more a part of this community has helped me understand the value.”

@dthlifestyle | lifestyle@dailytarheel.com

CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this article did not mention that Morrow and Max Dowdle created and curated the exhibition.