"Text in Process" Exhibition
RH Gallery
This event has ended.
This exhibition explores text-based art practices which employ language to visually consider the process of conceptualizing ideas while also presenting a pictorial investigation of language. The works in this exhibition depict the provisional space of language while working within the relationship between text and image.
This exhibition highlights the space in which text becomes image. Anne-Lise Coste’s recent series of paintings m, l, e expresses, in her own words,
“[T]he beginning of letters and beginning of words and sometimes their interlacing.” The cognitive processing of these works vascillates between a textual reading and an understanding akin to processing asemic writing. Works by León Ferrari can be read similarly. Ferrari’s works focus on longer handwritten texts whose implied meanings are built into their pictorial representation.
Stephanie Lempert’s work camouflages bodies of text into photographs of various environments such as the Brooklyn Bridge, thus merging image and text into one visual space. In Listen 3 (2010-2011), Robert Kinmont fuses his words with image in a sculpture which incorporates feathers and handwritten notes describing fragments of ideas. Ken Nicol has recently produced a series of works employing the techniques of concrete poetry. The phrase “fuck off” is repeated to the point that the text is constantly in flux, disappearing and reappearing within a pattern created by the words. Joanne K. Cheung’s work Reading/Not Reading depicts a sentence fragment that seems to be disappearing, offering a similar reading process to Nicol’s work. Micah Lexier’s Revelation series depicts private thoughts that are stricken, rendered in laser-cut steel. The artist begins by writing his thoughts with his left hand, and he subsequently strikes them with his right hand. In obfuscating the text, Lexier depicts the internal tension in the production of language. Joe Hardesty and Fiona Banner write descriptive narratives in their works which are echoed in their pictorial rendering. In each instance, words become image while image becomes words. In Body Count, Stephen Andrews transferred numbers representing reported deaths from newspaper headlines. Lexier also appropriates fragments of text from the newspaper creating a work that is provisional and mysterious. In a similar way, Valeska Soares’ Spelling Secrets series jumbles letters from a phrase and invites the viewer to decipher her secret. In Qiu Zhijie’s work Untitled (Female), the artist layers Chinese characters which contain the radical for “woman,” such as “wife” or “sister.” Although the characters are legible, they are layered repeatedly thus producing meaning through the resulting composite image and the text simultaneously. Finally, Sebastian Errazuriz appropriated slogans from the Occupy movement and painted them on a series of twelve chairs made in plywood. The chairs become both a sign of protest and a functional folding chair. By decontextualizing the words, the text takes on a new form.
Media
Schedule
from May 01, 2012 to June 22, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-05-01 from 18:00 to 20:00