Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Pinky’s Rule on view from March 16 through April 14 in the video gallery. Pinky’s Rule is a seven-minute animated drawing, originally made for the Bowery Poetry Club, consisting of images made by Amy Sillman using an iPhone app, and a sound track of Sillman reading a poem by Charles Bernstein.

To create this animated drawing/text collaboration, Sillman and Bernstein worked together back and forth, moving from image to poem and back again. It is impossible to say which came first, the poem or the images. The images bounce off the poem and the poem is constantly grappling with and extending the graphics. In doing so, Sillman & Bernstein have created a work in which the words offer versions of the pictures and the pictures are transfigurations of the words. They call their process “iconophrastic”, meaning both speaking pictures and pictures speaking. Motifs and icons are constantly permuted, turned over and upside down, and oscillated for good measure. Figuration dissolves into abstraction and abstraction bursts into song.

Amy Sillman is an artist whose work foregrounds the materiality of painting, as well as its psychological, formal, and comic dimensions. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim and American Academy in Berlin, and Radcliffe Institute fellowships. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected by public and private institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and San Francisco MoMA. A survey of her work will be held in 2013 at the ICA in Boston, which will be accompanied by a book.

Charles Bernstein is a poet and essayist. His most recent books are The Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (University of Chicago Press) and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Bernstein is Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also collaborated with visual artists Richard Tuttle, Mimi Gross, and Susan Bee, as well as working with Sillman on Duplexities, a set of over 100 drawing/poem pairs. His website is at epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein.