.Alignments & Entanglements

Astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat and BSA director Joe Scanlan and have collaborated on the Broodthaers Society of America's first foray into commissioning new artworks, an overlapping series of drawings titled Alignments and Entanglements. The drawings are inspired by Sparkly Kat's role as a professional astrologer and Marcel Broodthaers' third book of poetry, La Bête Noire.

La Bête Noire was conceived as a fictional zodiac. The modest book contains twelve short poems, each dedicated to a particular animal and each arranged on the page like a rebus that can be read horizontally or vertically or both. The book opens with a thirteenth, introductory poem titled "Le Zodiaque."

Likewise, all of the Alignment and Entanglement drawings use the twelve-part celestial map first developed by the Sumerians as a blank structure for exploring the zodiac through color, composition, appropriation, and collage.

Scanlan and Sparkly Kat first collaborated on the idea of Broodthaers' relation to the zodiac in 2017, when Sparkly Kat gave a lecture at Hauser & Wirth's Bookstore and Roth Bar in New York.

Alignments can be seen here
Entanglements can be seen here