Ellie Ga’s projects explore the limits of photographic documentation. Her work spans a variety of mediums, often incorporating her exploratory writing, and generally culminating in lectures, slide-presentations, handmade books and instructional installations. Classification of a Spit Stain (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009) is the result of her two-year project photographing and analyzing stains on city pavements. A combination of urban flaneurie and garbology, Classification of a Spit Stain is a mysterious field guide to the landscape underneath the soles of our shoes. For the Poetry Project Friday Night Series, Ellie will present “The Catalogue of the Lost (and other revelations)” a work done in the lecture format, created during a residency at the Explorers Club (NYC). Comprised of 282 images and lasting approximately 28 minutes, this work focuses on the missing pieces of early exploration–lost places, people, and concepts as well as the successes and failures to document “the unknown.” During 2007-2008, Ellie Ga was the artist-in-residence on the Tara, a polar schooner locked in the pack-ice of the Arctic Ocean. Her work from these projects were exhibited recently at the Konstmuseum in Malmo, Galerie du Jour in Paris, and Projekt 0047 in Oslo and PNCA in Portland, Oregon. She has also been an artist-in-residence at the Newark Museum of Art and the Women’s Studio Workshop. Her performances, videos and installations have been shown in New York at Dispatch, Swiss Institute-Contemporary Art, 16 Beaver, Rubin Museum of Art and Gigantic Art Space. Ellie Ga received her MFA in photography from Hunter College in 2004 and is a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse. Marina Temkina is a poet and an artist. She is an author of four poetry books in her native Russian, and two artists books made in collaboration with Michel Gerard & published in France. Her new book What Do You Want? will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse this spring. Marina received a National Endowment for the Arts in 1994 and she was a Revson Fellow on the Future of New York at Columbia University. Marina shows her visual art and concrete poetry internationally. Her public art project could be seen on the Second Street Stop of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail in Hoboken in 2004.