Great Lakes Overhead. Photo by Bruce Silcox.

Great Lakes Overhead. Photo by Bruce Silcox.

Great Lakes Overhead

An old overhead projector rolls around the city, making lecture halls of alleys, courtyards, street corners, and underpasses, where formality and objectivity are inverted to intimacy and art by a mock lecturer-poet. The subject is the populous, wild Great Lakes region at the Midwest’s back door, presented through poems and collages of projections: science and history slides, vacation pics, maps and pamphlets, live drawing, and projected water. Part performance art, part poetry recital, part installation, this all-night traveling piece is based on the artist’s circumnavigation of the Great Lakes by land and writing—professing its coherence, reckoning with its intertwined nature and culture, and romancing the heart of the vast borderland between the United States and Canada.