Hope Asemic Art

Invest in Hope with this asemic representation of the word. 

This artwork is part hieroglyph, part line drawing, and part visual manifestation of a local-to-global movement for hope. Read more about the year-long creation story of this symbol below.

Features

• Limited run of 500 canvas sheets
• Each painting is unique and numbered
• Numbered canvases delivered in order purchased

500 unique paintings represent Hope.

The collection is a gradient from start to finish. We started with pure white, and ended with almost pure black. For each painting, a gram of black paint was added to the mix. So not only is each painting hand done, it is a unique shade of gray.

The all white symbol and the all black symbol will be auctioned off at the pop-up launch exhibit, with 100% of proceeds going to Xilhouette.Horse and the launch of the community writing center.

We will not offer another collection like this.

Grassroots Funding: Our Goals & Roadmap

With your purchase of the Hope canvas, you will help us launch Xilhouette.Horse: a contest for young writers and artists in SD, a community writing center (pop-up workshops first), and an independent publisher of young authors and artists in San Diego.

X.H Launch Milestones

• Sell 500 Hope canvases
• Kickoff the SD contest for artists and writers
• Support the development of aspiring young writers in SD
• Publish a literary magazine featuring their work
• Publish book-length works from individual artists and writers
• Host pop-up exhibits and workshops to officially launch X.H

When you invest in Hope, what happens?

• 50% of proceeds goes toward X.H: SD contest launch, lit mag publication, writing center, workshop development, pop-up exhibit
• 20% goes to material cost, operations, and management of X.H
• 30% goes to artist of Hope asemic artwork

What do you get when you invest in Hope?

• Right now: you get the Hope canvas
• Next: behind the scenes updates and early access to contest entries
• Once we sell out: 1 year unfine art subscription
• Then: early sign ups for workshops and writing courses
• Plus: early access to limited run of lit mag and future books we’ll publish
• More? Yes more: early access to pop-up launch parties, exhibits, and purchase of artwork

What’s an unfine art subscription?

Once we sell out of the canvases, you will receive a piece of unfine art inspired by the work of X.H and our team each month.

What is unfine art? Unfine art is meant to capture a flicker of inspiration at the instant it occurs. It is a sketch of something greater in development. With your subscription, you will see a concept and its visual representation take shape as we explore the evolution of the idea.

Future subscriptions of unfine art will be sold through X.H. But as a thank you for your support, a 1-year subscription is included with your purchase.

More about the creation of Hope.

Isolated for 9 months in 2020, I was reading a lot. I was studying hieroglyphics and pictographs, etymology, sensations and how we translate feelings into language, how we move in this world and the verbs we use  to describe that movement. Through this journey, I discovered asemic art, or asemic writing in Peter Schwenger’s book Asemic the Art of Writing.

Asemic art essentially broke our conventions of communication in my mind. It broke sentences, words, letters, and images. This fracture allowed me to examine the granular elements, then piece them back together. This process allowed me to explore the nexus of imagination and perception from the pre-thought shimmer to awareness and the ultimate creation of some thing.

When the dust settled, still grappling with the pandemic and stay-home and work-from-home and navigating an awkward drive to return to normalcy, all of this energy was distilled as I began to experiment with asemic art. The Hope symbol here was the first symbol I created as part of a larger effort called This Atlas of Sensation, which combines writing and art to create a hybrid collection of more traditional poems and asemic poems.

Artwork donated by Silhouette.space

We’d like to thank our sister outfit at Silhouette.space for donating the Hope canvases.