TUCSON, AZ.- MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Tucson presents 500 Places at Once, an exhibition of work by the poet CAConrad that features new sculptural poems commissioned by MOCA and a reading room with the full series of publications from Fivehundred places, a small press established by the artist Jason Dodge.

Conrad, a polymath writer, teacher, editor, artist and activist, has authored nine books of their own poetry, and is known for their writings around ecopoetics, queer politics, and animal rights as well as the development of their (soma)tic writing rituals where poems are channeled through embodied exercises that expand perception and the possibilities of language. The exhibition features nine poems as art objects by Conrad, selected from the poet’s newest publication Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. The pieces in MOCA’s installation were realized through this (soma)tic ritual practice, which in Golden Boomerang involved writing with animals thriving in the anthropocene like crows and rats.

In MOCA’s gallery, the poems jump off the page and stand vertically at around five feet tall, prompting a physical encounter with the creature-like nature of the text and opening up space for a different kind of reading. Intermingling words and shapes, the nine poems suggest a gathering of poem-bodies or a small forest of poems and emphasize Conrad’s attention to the porous and manifold relationships between language and the body, internal landscapes and the environment.

The poems themselves curve and undulate on the page and in space––Conrad says “...my poems are breathing wild creatures. They stand on the bottom of the page, vibrating in the center of their bodies.” In the text, Conrad threads past, present, and future together to speak to earthly violences alongside crystalline moments of beauty, love, and liberation. With radical generosity Conrad writes, “if you call this planet / evil one more time / I will have to learn / to hold you better.”

The exhibition also contains a reading room with publications from Fivehundred places, a small press founded in 2012 by artist Jason Dodge, a close collaborator and friend of Conrad’s. Visitors are invited to peruse the full collection of the conceptually-driven press, which runs a single printing of 500 copies of books by poets such as Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Dorothea Laksy, and more.

The reading room at MOCA will feature new books by Bernadette Mayer, Bianca Stone, and Conrad. Created during the lead up to this exhibition, Conrad’s new collection of poems titled First Light, is co-published by Fivehundred places, MOCA, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Exhibition programming is co-presented with the University of Arizona Poetry Center. A free poetry reading will take place at MOCA Thursday, September 19th at 6pm. Conrad will also lead public workshops that focus on poetry, somatic practices, dates to be announced.

500 Places at Once is organized by Laura Copelin, Deputy Director & Lead Curator with Alexis Wilkinson, Curator.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.