Nico Vassilakis
Artist, poet, and writer Nico Vassilakis was born in New York City. His visual and video poetry is composed of letters and phrase fragments that are swept or cut into shapes emphasizing their structural qualities and ephemeral nature. Referring to Vassilakis's visual poetry as "less a work of grammar and words than an experiment with typography," the Stranger critic Paul Constant observed how he "works at the words, shoving them together and seeing what they do to each other when placed in close proximity."
Vassilakis's books include the poetry collection Disparate Magnets (2009) as well as the visual poetry book staring@poetics (2011). He collaborated with writer Friese Undine on Orange: A Manual (1997). Vassilakis edited Clear-Cut: Anthology: A Collection of Seattle Writers (1996), The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 (2012), and has served as coeditor of Sub Rosa Press. In 1994, he founded the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle, Washington. He currrently lives in New York City with his wife, poet Crystal Curry, and their sons.
About the images in Aleph Null
"What these images say and where they are going... It's been my stated position that the act of staring at a word will release the letters that comprise it. These letters are then freed to interact in unprecedented ways. Letter fragments, even aleatory markings, come together to assume new meaning while diminishing the social hierarchy of the word. The visuality of these examples function as an alternative method of seeing and result in unexpected ways of reading."
