Lens Flare is a collaboration between Derek Beaulieu and Rhys Farrell, based on the visual poetry published in Beaulieu’s Aperture sequence. Beaulieu’s concrete poems engage with dead media (dry-transfer lettering) to create disintegrating logos and letterforms, a crumbling vocabulary of suggestion and memory, and Farrell amplifies these images by adding walls of dynamic colour, pop-coloured panels of dynamism that suggest urban murals, playful geometrics and a day-glo lettristic discotheque.

Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty collections of poetry, prose, and criticism, including two volumes of his selected work, Please, No More Poetry (2013) and Konzeptuelle Arbeiten (2017). His most recent volume of fiction, a, A Novel was published by Paris’s Jean Boîte Editions. Beaulieu has exhibited his visual work across Canada, the United States, and Europe and has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students. He is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Rhys Douglas Farrell has completed a number of public art projects with the Telus Spark Science Center, Beltline Urban Mural Project, the City of Calgary. He recently completed residencies with Pinea & Linea De Costa A.I.R program in Spain, Graniti Murales in Sicily and the TARP Program in Kuala Lumpur with Taksu Gallery, and Farrell was the recipient of the 2019 Alumni Horizon Award from AUArts. Rhys’s work pays particular attention to colour theory and how line and shape affect visual perception, tying elements of graffiti and street painting with the minimal op-art tradition.

56pp / 250mm x 184mm / ISBN: 978-1-913749-06-4