AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD: a collaboration & exhibition by Transart Alumni Rachel Epp Buller & Derek Owens

"This temporary eruption, a conversation of vague intention" by Rachel Epp-Buller

Over the twelve months of 2020, Transart alumni, Rachel Epp-Buller and Derek Owens engaged in a long-distance collaboration. Each month they sent each other brief passages from texts they'd been reading with the intent of creating a series of objects incorporating this growing collection of words and phrases. They didn't reveal the sources to each other, lending the words a vaguely mysterious quality; decontextualized in this way, the artists sampled these fragments in a range of objects including found materials, collage, artist books, paper sculptures, suspended unbound pages, repurposed vintage scrap albums, cigar boxes, and word vines crawling across walls. The works were featured in "After the End of the End of the World," an exhibition at the Regier Art Gallery at Bethel College in February 2021 and curated by Rachel Epp-Buller. After the exhibit, the artists revisited all of the fragments they'd sent each other and mined them a second time for a 12-part call-and-response text. This publication documents both the exhibit and that final poem:

 https://issuu.com/bethelcollege1887/docs/after_the_end_of_the_world

"to have been astronauts" by Derek Owens