The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Jen Hofer's Lead & Tether is a collection of daily cut ups from newspapers in the town she's in for the day--L.A., N.Y., Washington, and Tijuana. The cover of the chapbook is made with newspaper laminated and sown together. The poems themselves, in both English and Spanish, vary, but there is definitely a layer of social/political commentary that carries throughout the collection:

muted
incessantly
revolution
to market
People now
want something

[Please note that I have not retained her spacing and her text comes from a cut up]

Hofer's use of the newspaper text for criticism news makes the individual pieces interesting, but even more, this chapbook typifies what is great about the Dusie Kollectiv project. Hofer tells us where she was on a specific day, she tells us that the chapbooks are hand-stitched, and she tells us in a note what the project is for. Basically, she grounds the project in a specific individual at a specific time, and to have a copy of the project is to have a craft object in your hands. In essence, it's a stand, granted a small one, against the corporate nature of contemporary art, and it does so by mixing mass produced text (the newspaper) with individual crafting (arrangement and sowing).

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