The Rock Cycle is a collaboration between the poet Josh Ascherman and the visual artist Ali Vaughan. Last year, they began a series of conversations initiated by a group of graphite drawings Vaughan had produced in 2021. The drawings originated from Vaughan’s interest in her upbringing in California’s Central Valley and the resonances of the existing oil and gas industries. In response to the drawings and regular conversations with Vaughan, Ascherman wrote a longform, durational—but fragmentary—poem. The drawings and writing will eventually be combined into an artist book.
In reading from The Rock Cycle, Ascherman and Vaughan hope to realize the form of their collaboration. Rather than simply reading the text written for the project, this performance evokes the landscape of shared references between the two artists. Like the real world natural process that shares this piece’s name, Ascherman and Vaughan think of their dynamic as an open, continuing process—not a single fragment of writing or a drawing in graphite, but an ongoing system of changes.
A limited run of The Rock Cycle zines will be available to those in attendance.
Free. All are welcome.
Doors open at 10:30. Light refreshments served.
Josh Ascherman is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His practice has often been concerned with detritus: things that accumulate by accident, are within reach but have no obvious use, or have been left behind as concrete evidence of events. He has an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, where he received the Truman Capote Foundation Fellowship; Architrave Press has published his work and has been recognized with the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize by the Department of English at Harvard University.
Ali Vaughan is an artist born in Bakersfield, CA and currently based out of Richmond, CA. She works between sculpture, drawing, and painting. Her work is concerned with investigating affinities between memory and geology through the lens of the body, landscape, and industry. Vaughan creates 2 and 3 dimensional works in materials such as wood, cardboard, and steel, subverting the materials’ typical practical or industrial applications while also excavating their inherent physical properties. The work is an attempt to collapse the worlds of the internal (body, mind, self) and external (landscape, architecture, industry) through the transfiguration of material. Vaughan received a BA with Honors from Stanford University, and has been included in group shows at the de Young Museum, the Coulter Art Gallery, and the Stanford Art Gallery. She has participated in residency programs at Radio28 Creative Studios in Mexico City and The Steel Yard in Providence, RI, and has received the Lorenz Eitner Prize in Art and Art History and the Louis Sudler Award in the Creative and Performing Arts.