A groundbreaking exhibition of works by artists who use letters and text as their material will open in the University Gallery on Jan. 16.

“InWords: the art of language” will be exhibited through March 23 and is curated by Lance Winn, assistant professor of art at UD.
The artists included in the exhibition represent a new generation and are looking less at the meaning of language and more at how its physical form or way of being produced might affect understanding, Winn says. These artists build with language and use it to generate new images and objects, so that language becomes a material instead of something that is used to make a point.

“The featured artists look beyond the meaning/full properties of language to focus on how its physical form impacts understanding,” Winn says. “Using language to build and generate new images and objects, the artists force an experiential rather than intellectual interpretation, challenging the viewer’s assumption that words convey a universal meaning.

“Although aware of the cultural signification of the language they work with, these artists reveal the difficulty of separating the meaning of words from their physical context and aesthetic qualities.”

One of the featured artists is Cy Twombly, whose work is considered as a point of departure for later artists. The exhibition includes three color lithographs from Twombly’s series Roman Notes IV, in which the appearance of writing is replicated in marks that challenge resolution into recognizable letters. Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain series similarly moves between image and text by creating forms that border on the edge of legibility.

Paintings and sculptures by Suzanne McClelland, Carson Fox and Nancy Dwyer use recognizable words as the form and subject of their works. Winn says that McClelland and Fox surprise the viewer by presenting single words in a format that seems contrary to the actual meaning of the words they choose, while Dwyer’s sculpted and painted series Deep I and Deep II experiment with physical representations of a word’s meaning.

Janet Zweig takes the interpretation of words as material even further by focusing on the most common medium for conveying words, Winn says. Using large rolls of paper, Zweig represents such common phrases as “thanks a million” and “vicious circle.”

Still another featured artist, Nina Katchadourian, approaches text from the perspective of spoken rather than written language. Her piece Talking Popcorn translates the sounds made by popping kernels in an old-fashioned popcorn machine into human-like speech patterns by using Morse code. The “words” are spoken aloud and finally transcribed at the end of each day.

Similarly, Abby Donovan leaves the generation of meaning to chance by constructing and stacking Cervantes’ text in her ceramic piece Some of What Don Quixote Said.

Erica Baum searches for accidental but evocative intersections of words in such places as disappearing systems of card catalogs and inventories. On a different note, Udomsak Krisanamis uses letters in found materials such as newspapers as starting points for developing positive and negative space.

Finally, in sculpted work, Chris Walla moves beyond the forms of words to even more abstract elements of language. The thought bubbles that comprise some of Walla’s work take the visual indications of spoken language as their subject.

“While most of the work in ‘InWords’ is built out of words, the artists display a particularly personal and introspective connection to the language they work with,” Winn says. “Nearly all of the pieces strike me as monologues, allowing the private parts of the thought process to become public.”

A member of the UD faculty since 2004, Winn works through drawing, performance/video, installation and robotics to explore the types of distortion that happen when information is translated and reproduced. Some of his recent work involves tracing language until it becomes pattern and collaborating with Simone Jones on robotic video projectors that capture and reproduce a determined path.

Winn received his bachelor’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and his master’s degree, both in fine arts, from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

The University Gallery is in Old College, at Main Street and North College Avenue. The gallery is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays; and 1-4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. It is closed on Mondays and University holidays. Admission is free.

For information about other upcoming exhibitions, visit [www.museums.udel.edu], or call (302) 831-8037 to be added to the mailing list.