Kristin Bauer 

Poetics of Impermanence 

On display November 4–13, 2022

Tempe, Arizona 

Poetics of Impermanence is an animated visual poetry AR artwork featuring multiple activation sites, each based on the elements: water, earth, fire, and air. Walking along the canal, visitors will encounter illuminated plexiglass boxes along the walkway, with QR codes to activate colorfully animated text of the artist’s poetic writing. Poetics of Impermanence takes the artist’s own poetry writing off the page, bringing it to life in the environment and exploring human interconnectedness with nature. The preciousness of water, as resource and element, and the necessity of it for life is so frequently captured in poetry, as it is also a symbol for so many things: emotion, the womb, mother, purification, change, grief, seasons, etc. A “5th element” will result from a workshop, incorporating the public’s collective poetic responses to the project in a final AR projection at the bridge on the second weekend of Canal Convergence. 

Biography 

Kristin Bauer is an interdisciplinary artist born in Minnesota and based in Tempe and Los Angeles, with professional and educational background in art, psychology, art therapy, and writing. Her recent public activating projects include Counter/Balance, a sculpture and performance art piece at Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota; Pilot Projects at Arizona State University Art Museum; Enduring Apocalypse performance art event at the Abrons Art Center, New York; Untitled Gestures, a solo text art installation across on the front of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) and numerous community art spaces; and Collective Chorus, a Field Projects program involving pedagogy, text art installation, and collaboration at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Bauer’s recent exhibitions include Breaking Up at Phoenix Art Museum; the TEXT Show at CMay Gallery, Los Angeles; Cutting Edges at Cheryl Hazan Gallery in Tribeca, New York; and collaborative work in exhibitions at WhiteBox Harlem, New York, and Ethan Cohen KuBe, Beacon, New York. Bauer’s artwork has been shown internationally, including the TransBorder Biennial at El Paso Museum of Art, Texas; Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile; and Nicholas Projects, Melbourne, Australia, among others. Upcoming exhibitions in 2023 include Information in Times of Miscommunication, curated by Lauren O’Connell at SMoCA, in addition to the publication of her first book, Kristin Bauer: This Is Like That, with Hirmer Verlag, in Munich, internationally available in Spring 2023.