Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi – "The Corpses"

Laura Bell, a painter based in the Bronx, and Ian Ganassi, a poet in New Haven, met as artists in residence at the Millay Colony. In 2005, they began mailing between them the ongoing collaborative collage/assemblage series “The Corpses” (the series title refers to the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse). The collaboration began with an unfinished poem and handwritten phrases on a piece of printer paper stained with coffee rings that Ganassi mailed to Bell. With each mailing, words, images, and objects are added and new pieces are started; at any point, either of them can call a piece finished. At first, it was assumed that Ganassi would contribute text and Bell visuals, but this division soon dissolved.

Politics, pop culture, religion, and literature make appearances. A collage might go back and forth many times or make only one circuit—pieces are minimal or layered, develop themes or function almost as diaries (a hospital glove, a postcard). The gathering of materials has become a consuming habit, combining found objects, text, drawings, ads, photos, fabrics, and all manner of mixed media—a painterly, visceral process, the anti-Photoshop. “The Corpses turned us into scavengers,” says Ganassi. “We ended up trying to get the whole world into them.”

While the process has retained its initial sense of play, the series soon demanded a level of intention equal to the work Ganassi and Bell were publishing and exhibiting individually. Called "joyously Fluxus-like" by Robert Shuster in the Village Voice and described by writer Byron Earhart as going "beyond collaborative to a kind of conspiratorial imagination," "The Corpses" has evolved into more than a decade of personal and material call-and-response. At present, there are more than 300 finished works. A new batch is usually in progress or in transit.