Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

In Residence: March 22 - April 29, 2010 Exhibition: opens April 30, continues through May 21, 2010 Learning Lab for Youth: The Denver Center for Crime Victims with youth from Urban PeakA Third Sight: Explorations in Visual and Literary CollageHarrison Candelaria Fletcher, an essayist, journalist and mixed-media artist, grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother, an artist, collector and dreamer, spent weekends exploring the back roads and second-hand shops of New Mexico seeking treasures others had overlooked. “Look closely,” she would say, “everything here tells a story.” As an adult, few people had explained that notion to him more clearly than Joseph Cornell. From the late Twenties until his death at sixty-nine in 1972, Cornell explored the byways of New York City plucking objects from thrift shops shelves and arranging them in glass-covered “shadowboxes.” A broken doll. An astronomy chart. A bell jar. These were the artifacts that spoke to Cornell. In his basement on Utopia Parkway, he gave then new life.It is this kind of alchemy he will bring to PlatteForum. During his residency her will create, along with high school youth, a series of “literary collages.” These will include poems, vignettes and short stories that will be assembled into objects and images that become three-dimensional portraits of the participants.About the ArtistHarrison Candelaria Fletcher earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His writing has appeared in the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, New Ohio Review, Water~Stone Review, Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, Palabra, and many other literary journals. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, National Magazine Award and Pen Center USA contest, his recent honors include a New Letters best essay award and Pushcart Prize special citation. He lives in Denver with his wife and two children and is at work on his second memoir. He is also co-editor of Shadowbox, a journal of non-fiction art