Rebecca La Marre
My Deuce, My Double, My Dear Image
My Deuce, My Double, My Dear Image is a line of poetry borrowed from WH Auden’s most highly praised yet least popular work, The Age of Anxiety. This audio work was produced by Rebecca La Marre for AKA artist-run in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, during a residency throughout 2021. It is published in a format reminiscent of early 2000s You-Tube amateur audiobooks.
The text was produced using daily writings that span November 2019 to May 2020. The assembled fragments were selected approximately chronologically, but otherwise at random. The auto-fictive texts were edited by a process that involved reading aloud and then parsing the result with transcription software, ultimately creating a script that was then recorded. This way of working is a nod to writers and artists like Kathy Acker, Eva Hesse, R. D. Laing, André Breton, René (Colette Thomas) and Lucy Lippard.
Through this process it became clear that the selection of text was determined by a fragment’s lack of specificity, despite its arrival during an event. The feelings and experiences described, upon examination, could refer to instances in other times and places, as well as to those of other people. Phrases were sometimes identifiable as echoes of the speech, writing and half-remembered stories of other speakers.
The result is a text that bears witness to how the mind creates pain, what disassociation looks like as a mode of being-in-language, and what French writers refer to as la force mobilisatrice des images. The text is an esquisse, an outline, an arrow moving towards the horizon of a non-appropriative and materialist argument for art’s capacity to heal and language’s capacity to change bodies..
In 2021, AKA artist run opened its doors to local artists, offering space to work in the form of studios. Rebecca La Marre used this time to realize her long-held dream of founding a press that publishes work by artists who move across writing and craft-based disciplines.
Apophony Press is a platform for publications made by artists. It publishes printed books and journals, audiobooks, digital publications and ceramics that act as surfaces or tools for writing.
Apophony is the opposite of an epiphany. Apophenia is when a person frequently perceives there to be connections between things that are commonly judged to be unrelated, like in bibliomancy, tea-leaf reading or gambling. The neurotransmitter associated with this phenomenon is dopamine.
Artists are both celebrated and criticized for seeking connections between images, objects and events that defy conventional notions of reason. This press publishes their efforts.
Rebecca La Marre
Rebecca La Marre is a queer Canadian artist with a writing, research and performance practice. She uses clay and text to give form to questions about what it means to be a person in the world, and how ideological structures, language and ritual shape experience.
Her work is exhibited and published internationally. Venues include the Serpentine Gallery, MOMA PS1, and the Darling Foundry. Her writing has been published widely in journals and periodicals, with a forthcoming piece in The Happy Hypocrite this year. She is an emeritus commissioning editor for E.R.O.S. Journal.