The next meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Monday, August 26, 2013 at 7:00 PM at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street in the Bark Room, M101. Free and open to the public.
Presentation: In Your Place: Bishakh Som’s Other Worlds and Once-Removed Life Stories features anonymous memoirist and imaginary geographer Bishakh Som in conversation with art-pulp comic scripter and semiotician-for-hire Adam McGovern. Bishakh creates living landscapes of visionary techno-wilderness and puts turningpoints of life and possible paths of history on paper with astounding compositional novelty and immediate emotional familiarity. He draws on his accomplished architectural training to manipulate the comic page’s optical topography in entirely fresh ways, and refers to his trans-cultural background to create dramas of bitter ebullience and comforting disorientation. A contributor to the acclaimed Graphic Canon 3, Bishakh will read a story from his pending anthology Apsara Engine, show works from across his career and its future, and talk with Adam and the audience about constructed images and reconstructed lives.
Bishakh Som was born in Ethiopia and lives in Brooklyn. He received a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University and worked at I.M. Pei & Partners’ New York office and elsewhere, contributing to projects for The Israel Museum, Caltech, and a new concert hall for the Cleveland Institute of Music among many others. His first solo collection of comics, Angel, was published on a prestigious Xeric grant in 2003. He exhibited paintings in a solo show, Animal Magic, at Brooklyn’s ArtLexis gallery in 2010. Bishakh’s work has appeared in The Graphic Canon and The Brooklyn Rail. His graphic-novel history of prefabricated bathrooms (with collaborator Deborah Schneiderman) will be published by McFarland Press in 2014; his 200-page collection of seven hand-painted stories, Apsara Engine, is in consideration by several publishers. Read more into him here.
Adam McGovern writes and lectures on pop culture for HiLoBrow.com, Tor.com, the Montclair Art Museum, il Museo Ferragamo and others; he has written stories published by Image Comics and AdHouse Books, published poetry on The Rumpus and holds forth at Fanchild, where you can learn more than you want to.
