Language Is a Temptation: Sarah Cain reads July 10 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: visual artist Sarah Cain reads July 10 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Sarah Cain is redefining abstraction in feminist terms as an architecture for transformative, embodied, emotive experience. Solo exhibitions include The Aspen Art Museum (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2017); Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh (2015), and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2015). Cain has forthcoming solo exhibitions at National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2020) and The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs NY (2021). Her works been featured in the New York Times, LA Times, Art Forum, and Architectural Digest. Select collections include Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Perez Art Museum Miami.

Language Is a Temptation is a series of 3 minute readings from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory that are posted on our Instagram, YouTube, and website daily at 3pm.

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on a month long experiment: every day she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a journal. The result was a groundbreaking, conceptual work, comprised of more than 1100 photographs and two hundred pages of text. Mayer’s durational and constraint-based diaristic work of poetry and photography investigates the nature of memory: its surfaces, textures and material.

In July 2020, Poets House and Siglio Press embark on a month long daily experiment: a passage from the corresponding day in 1971 will be read by poets, writers, critics, and artists, as a parallel durational work that celebrates the new publication of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (Siglio Press, 2020), which brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form.