NYAB Event - Charles Gute "FIND-A-TEXT"

Charles Gute "FIND-A-TEXT"

Jason Rulnick Gallery

This event has ended.

Jason Rulnick is pleased to announce “FIND-A-TEXT,” a solo exhibition of works by Charles Gute that will inaugurate the gallery’s new location.

Gute has created a series of canvas wall works that resonate with text-based art-making practices that first emerged during the late sixties and early seventies. Yet the works will at the same time
be immediately recognizable to a much broader audience: they are in the form of a popular puzzle format—known variously as Word Search, Word Find, etc.—in which words are “hidden” within a field of random letters. Like the conceptual works they visually echo, which were often self-published and circulated outside traditional art contexts, such puzzles also emerged during the late 1960s; the first was reputedly published in 1968 in the Selenby Digest, a listing of local want ads that was distributed for free at a supermarket in Norman, Oklahoma. Cheaply printed and bound collections of these puzzles are still sold today as impulse items at grocery checkout
counters and newsstands.

Unlike popular word search puzzles that commonly contain hidden words grouped around popcultural themes such as television or sports, Gute’s austere text grids contain names and references that are grounded firmly within the realm of contemporary art.

In each work, the contemplative gaze of the viewer is conflated with that of the puzzle-solver looking for hidden words. This dual reception playfully questions the notion of art as a “puzzle” with hidden meanings that the viewer must decode in order to appreciate.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 96-page paperback publication—a book that both emulates the look and feel of mass-market puzzle books and that effectively functions as a catalogue raisonné of this particular body of work.