No snow? Artist improvises in next installation of ongoing series

Buffalo. February. Snow.

A given, right?

Christina Milletti thought so when she prepared the schedule for this week’s visit by Shelley Jackson, the WBFO Visiting Professor in the Arts for 2015-16. As part of her visit, Jackson, a fiction writer and conceptual artist, was to prepare special installations of her ongoing Instagram-based fiction “Snow” — a story written in the snow one word at a time —on both the UB North Campus and downtown at Silo City.

But the absence of snow on Tuesday forced Jackson to improvise.

“We ended up heading down to Lake Erie on the Outer Harbor and Shelley used pieces of the breaking ice as her canvas,” said Milletti, associate professor of English who coordinates the Exhibit X series and worked with UB colleagues Dimitri Anastasopoulos, English; Josephine Anstey, Media Study; and Paul Vanouse, Art, to prepare the proposal to bring Jackson to UB. “Since she prefers every word to be a little different, she was taken by the idea of these particular words floating away, or spinning in the water.”

However, the ice was difficult to work with, Milletti said, “so she kept the words on the extremely short side. An ‘of’ and an ‘a’ and an abandoned ‘the,’ which broke apart, are now bobbing around the lake.”

The artist never made it to the North Campus, which was as devoid of snow as downtown Buffalo.

“Ironically, as soon as Shelley flew back to New York City last night, we received 4 inches of lake effect snow downtown,” Milletti told the UB Reporter on Wednesday. If we still have snow in March, when she returns, we’ll be sure to complete the campus installation then,” she said.

Jackson’s “Buffalo words” will be available soon when the artist uploads them to her Instagram account.

“When that happens, the Instagram map will also show the words’ location in Buffalo,” Milletti noted. “So far, they’ll be the only ‘words’ written in upstate New York.”

Jackson’s “Snow” project is reminiscent of her “Skin” project in which she tattoos a story on 2,095 volunteers — also one word at a time.

Jackson “excels at thinking across formal disciplines,” said Milletti, who calls the artist “a unique interdisciplinary writer in that her work in and with narrative moves conceptually between the realms of print, media and art in order to examine the relationship between bodies and texts.”

During this week’s visit, Jackson met with media study graduate students on Monday and later that day gave a talk as part of the department’s PLASMA (Performances, Lectures and Screenings in Media Art) series.

During her return visit in March, Milletti said Jackson will meet with undergraduate and graduate creative writing students, as well as art students. She also will take part in a three-day workshop hosted by Vanouse in the new “bio-art lab” Vanouse founded with the help of a Community of Excellence proposal.