JAPANESE AMERICAN ARTIST SANDRA HONDA'S
'BROKEN PROMISES, BROKEN DREAMS'
NOW HEAR THIS
ARTIST KATHLEEN CAPRARIO COLLABORATES WITH THREE OREGON POETS TO INTERROGATE WHITE
PRIVILEGE AS PART OF THE MAUDE KERNS EXHIBIT SOCIAL BEING By Jenna Comstock
enjamin Gorman, a poet and high school English
teacher living in Independence, Oregon, points
to the immediacy of poetry as its source of
strength. Detailing the process of collaborat-
ing over Zoom with Eugene artist Kathleen
Caprario for the piece “Patterns of Privilege:
Now Hear This,” he recalls a line about poetry’s
power that holds a permanent place in his mind.
“It’s from a conversation with Kim Stafford. He points
to how poetry responds to what is happening as it is
happening,” Gorman says of Stafford, Oregon’s former
poet laureate, “unlike a novel that takes more time to put
out after that initial spark.”
The immediacy and strength of poetry is what pulled
Caprario, primarily a visual artist, into collaboration
with three Oregon poets — Gorman, Bobbie Calhoun and
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Carter McKenzie — for her upcoming work, which will be
shown alongside the work of four other female artists in
the exhibit Social Being, opening at Maude Kerns Art
Center Jan. 14.
Gorman talks about how Caprario recognized that
their poetry and her textiles “can communicate with one
another in a way that will be beneficial to the reader of
both kinds of texts.”
Caprario’s work interrogates her position of privilege as
a white woman in an effort to re-examine her own patterns
of communication and being without perpetuating what
it is she interrogates. “Patterns of Privilege: Now Hear
This” displays the printed poems in the sequence Caprario
intends them to be read. Between them hang strips of
white sheets depicting imagery evoked by the poems.
An adjunct instructor in art at Lane Community College
since 1995, Caprario has a well established, yet ever
evolving, presence in Eugene’s arts community. After
her husband’s death by suicide in 2001, Caprario, who
had primarily worked in painting and textiles since her
late teens and early 20s, stepped boldly into writing for
the screen and dabbled in stand-up comedy. Her short
film Mourning After was shown at the Non-Juried Short
Film Corner in Cannes, France, in 2014. No matter what
the medium, Caprario describes working in layers and
making connections.
Caprario notes how in her early years as an artist, any
idea that floated into her head felt like fair game. “Now I
am much more aware,” she says. Her recent and upcom-
ing work is about social justice. And she points out that
it interrogates her position, rather than commenting on
an experience she has not had. “That’s what a colonizing
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M