Poetry X eleven = Lake Antiquity. Lake Antiquity = a rectangular swimming pool in the E.U.R. district in Rome, built by Benito Mussolini to be heralded at the 1942 World Expo as the epicenter of Fascism. Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity meets the challenge of this absurdity and countless ineradicable others. The culmination of more than a decade of visionary irreverence, this fulminating iteration of text-collages makes the perfect holiday gift for the poetry lover. Brandon Downing has been scouring refuse piles and skimming the creme/scum off the top of two centuries of cultural production for these chiming elements. His paste-ups are cut-ups; his cut-ups are pasted with a discrimination that shares a border with insurgency. Brandon Downing is a videomaker, visual artist, and writer, originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2000, he has lived in New York City, where he works as an exhibit designer and writer. His poetry collections include The Shirt Weapon (Germ, 2002), and Dark Brandon (Faux, 2005). An online gallery of much of his recent photographic work can be seen at www.brandondowning.org. A feature-length DVD collection of recent video works, Dark Brandon // Eternal Classics, was released in 2007.
