Rachael Guynn Wilson


raeguynn [at] gmail.com


about

writing


essays, reviews, poetry

teaching


sample syllabi & course materials

editing


editorial & design work

in-between things


everything else

Most Perfect World
an arts blog co-authored with Garth Swanson, active between 2012 and 2015, later resurrected as a small press. The inaugural publication, James Loop’s Amatory Imitations, was co-published with Pinsapo Press in 2023.

The Organism for Poetic Research
co-founded in 2011 with Ada Smailbegovic and Daniel C. Remein, the OPR operates as a research group, small publisher and maker of poetic experiments.

The Stationmaster’s Daughter
exhibition catalog created with MC Hyland as documentation and response to a collaborative art/research project of the same name by Wendy Ann Lee, Kevin Lips, R. Blair Sullivan, and Mimi Yuen.

Model of an Error
installation for Initial Contractions exhibition at the Knockdown Center in Queens, New York in November 2013. 

On Montez Press Radio
curated a two-part “poet’s playlist” for Montez Press Radio as part of a radio residency for the Organism for Poetic Research in 2018; interviewed poet Youmna Chlala for Litmus Press in 2020; performed as “Sobriety Nib” in radio drama, APPLETINI, Or, The Perills of Speeche by Anonymous Botch in 2021.

Being and Event: selected meditations
artist’s book made for Wendy’s Subway + Aeromoto Reading Room at NADA New York in 2015.

Leisure Practicum I + II
Place gallery (Portland, Oregon). A two-part event with readings, performances, and an installation, exploring the idea and practice of leisure, 2011.  

The Stationmaster’s Daughter (2020) is a publication that emerged from a year-long, open-ended collaboration between a humanities scholar, a performance artist, a sculptor, and a photographer that resulted in a site-specific day-long installation work. MC Hyland and I designed the invitation to the event (the above poster-booklet printed on vellum tabloid-sized paper) and the “exhibition catalog,” which was published by the Organism for Poetic Research. Under the auspices of the OPR, we created a détourned audience survey to poll attendees regarding their experience of the event. Survey results are presented alongside superfluous data visualizations in the book.





Model of an Error was installed during the Initial Contractions exhibition on Saturday, November 23, 2013 at the Knockdown Center in Queens, New York. The project attempted the reconstruction of an optics experiment first performed by Johannes Kepler in 1601, as described in Lisa Robertson’s Thinking Space (OPR, 2013). The work was also an experiment in literalizing or at least modelling some of the contours of Robertson’s writing and thought in this book. “There is a series of rooms. Each room frames a table, a book, and an opening to the outside—an aperture of some sort. At times they may be called studies or observatories or libraries but they are only rooms. Each has shaped a research,” Robertson writes.

Around the table, in places of repose and relative isolation, we placed four chairs, each with a reading copy of Thinking Space, as a casual invitation to read and contemplate the entanglements of Robertson’s essay and Kepler’s experiment—as well as inscription and experiment, the textual and bodied, thinking and space.




Listen to the Poet’s Playlist Part I and Part II. Listen to my interview with Youmna Chlala




Installation view (partial) of Wendy’s Subway + Aeromoto reading room at NADA New York in 2015, with Being and Event: selected meditations in the left foreground. 

What I wrote about it then:
Being and Event, selected meditations is a hybrid book that engages the library’s project of creating “idiosyncratic book pairings,” while also literalizing the contemporary fetish for interdisciplinary thinking and practice in art and academia. The book is a republication of selected “meditations” from French philosopher Alain Badiou’s seminal work, Being and Event. The book has been scaled up to the letter-size format typical of magazines, and a pornographic magazine has been perfect bound in the center of the book. In this way, Being and Event, selected meditations reflects on the distractions and “guilty pleasures” that frequently frustrate attempts to dedicate oneself to “serious” work. Internalizing disruption in the form of hardcore pornography, Being and Event, selected meditations also suggests the need for pleasure, fantasy, and the body to interfere with the labor of philosophy.


Alain Badiou reads Being and Event, selected meditations while attending the event “Double Entendre: Katy Bohinc, Rachael Wilson, & Jamieson Webster” as a guest (performatively playing himself) at Wendy’s Subway on December 13, 2015.

RACHAEL GUYNN WILSON
Brooklyn, NY