The Fluke Illuminator

Michael Peters and John M. Bennett created these Illuminations between 2001 and 2015. They could be called Visual Poems or Visual Stories or Art or Totemic Screens, or something else entirely. To create them, something like five “starts”—a few letters or an image or a rubber stamp or some combination thereof—were sent out in the mail (the first nine were done together at an artist's residency), and when these were added to by the receiving collaborator, the same five “Fluke Illuminations” were sent back to the original sender along with five new Fluke “starts.” Materials in this overlapping process include alphabetic stamps, graphite pencils, colored pencils, rubber stamps, typewriters, handwriting, newspaper and magazine images, black ink, magic markers, and both acrylic paint and white exterior house paint. The result is a stunningly beautiful body of work that will repay many revisitings.