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 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, the works evolve, and new pieces are started. Both can call a piece finished; some go back and forth multiple times, and others make only one circuit. Politics, pop culture, religion, and literature make appearances. Gathering materials has become a consuming habit, combining found objects, text, drawings, ads, photos, fabrics, and 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.” The series has evolved into a decade of personal and material call-and-response, with a new batch usually in progress or transit.