an opening for TAPEWORM
a collaborative exhibition based on Darren Wershler-Henry's
The Tapeworm Foundry (and/or the dangerous prevalence of imagination)
Thursday, 11/20 at 7PM
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
This event will be webcast live: find out more by clicking here.
Tapeworm is a collaboration of art projects radiating from a writing piece by Canadian artist Darren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm Foundry (andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination). The text is available on UbuWeb. The Tapeworm Foundry is an intriguing instance of conceptual writing, faithfully formulaic but also unusually compelling in its fruition: a single rambling, unpunctuated sequence of possible projects, ranging from quirky to absurd to highly ambiguous and all largely allusive of the twentieth century avant-garde. The potential 'instructions' that comprise Tapeworm, linked by the pulsating conjunction 'andor', are themselves mini-premises for a thousand other projects, making the 50-page list the ultimate conceptual catalyst.
This exhibition challenges a group of young contemporary artists and writers at Penn to realize some of Wershler-Henry's hypothetical instructions. The Penn students and graduates participating in the exhibition include: Grace Ambrose, Joyce Lee, Ned Eisenberg, Vladimir Zykov, Kimberly Eisler, Artie Vierkant, John Carroll, Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Arielle Brousse, Manya Scheps, Brooke Palmieri, Nick Salvatore, Robin McDowell, Sofie Hodara, Cecilia Corrigan, and Thomson Guster, with assistance from James La Marre and Trisha Low. Curated by Kaegan Sparks. There will be a limited quantity of complimentary exhibition catalogues available at the opening. Please email kwhart@writing.upenn.edu for more information.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
