Artist Statement:
My drawings are visual translations of baseball statistics. Each dot drawing correlates with a starting pitcher’s performance in a specific game. A starting pitcher is often the player on the team promoted and associated most with a single game because their schedules are predetermined and they play only once every 5 days.
Basically, if the dots are spread out, the pitcher had a good game, they ate up lots of innings and did not allow many people on base. If the dots are squeezed close together, the pitcher has done more poorly. The drawings spatialize and aestheticize the way a pitcher’s performance controls the time and pace of a game.
Alex Wells Shapiro (he/him) is a poet and artist from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. He reads submissions for Another Chicago Magazine and Frontier Poetry, and is a co-founder of Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by The Guild Literary Complex. His work is recently published or forthcoming Blood Tree Literature, Boudin, Pangyrus, and Digging Through the Fat. More of his work may be found at www.alexwellsshapiro.com.
