Textile asemics by Lisa Iversen (Indiana, USA)

Asemic visual poetry by Lisa Iversen (Indiana, USA)

I am very excited to welcome artist and legendary mail artist Lisa Iversen to Asemic Front 2. 

Lisa Iversen is a longtime veteran of the Eternal Network who attained much of her revered status in the last decade due to her association with Trashpo, a correspondence art "movement" that achieved unexpected popularity. Trashpo was inspired by Jim Leftwich and centered around Diane Keys (both USA visual poets of note); it focused on language-centered found material. 

Those familiar with Iversen's work will, doubtless, identify her use of found material and organic form in the work above as a Trashpo encore, a tip of the hat, a bow, a nod (and wink) to the re-energized mail art network of the last decade. 

Iversen's work exists in that all-important intersection between visual poetry and the Eternal Network. She experimented with asemic writing when the practice was still relatively unknown and even less understood than it is today.

Many of us, myself included, will see the work through a lens of nostalgia and a yearning for old friends; but this response is misleading.

I suspect Lisa Iversen, aka Skybridge Studios. is too often associated with a Fluxus-based anti-art. (Sadly, this was the fate of a number of Trashpoets who were far, far from the postavant.) A search through Lisa Iversen's work online is well worth the investment in time, although I wish more of it was easily accessible. 

She participated in a number of Cheryl Penn's (South Africa) collaborative book projects, has created visual poetry of an extraordinary caliber and has produced very fine textile art. (She is reticent and perhaps even reclusive.) I believe the textile nature of this piece is far more significant than the gleeful play of anti-art tropes, which she commands flawlessly. 

I hope Lisa Iversen will continue to contribute to Asemic Front 2.

- De Villo Sloan