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InWords: The Art of Language
University Gallery, University of Delaware
January 16 – March 21, 2007
What if we looked at words from a different angle? Do we forget to pay attention in light of our assumptions about how we communicate? What if all the words from books left the page and piled up? How much would it weigh? What type of structures would it build?
These are the questions posed by curator Lance Winn in InWords:The Art of Language, featuring the work of 11 artists who, since the 1960s, have been inspired by the beauty of language as form. Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Brice Marden offer a point of departure for the works of artists Erica Baum, Abby Donovan, Nancy Dwyer, Ken Fandell, Carson Fox, Nina Katchdourian, Tony Hepburn, Susanne McClelland, Chris Walla, Holland Williams and Janet Zweig.
Winn writes: “One of the ways we have traditionally been taught to understand visual art is to divide it into form and content. The form is the vessel that holds content, which is what we we’re supposed to 'get.' The artists featured in Inwords collapse these distinctions, using text as a way to return us to our senses. The works allow us to position ourselves in a literal relation to meaning and suggest that everything in our contemporary world cannot be solved like an equation. And while it could be inferred that the group is skeptical of understanding the word as information, I tend to look at the art in Inwords as a celebration of other kinds of sense that add dimension to our experience.”
The process by which language was formed can be seen in Nina Katchadourian’s Talking Popcorn, while Erica Baum, in the guise of a kind of “word-detective,” hunts down concrete instances where language is stored and catalogued as a system rather than as a communication. Tony Hepburn puts language on an axis and sets it spinning, forcing language into dimensionality, while Ken Fandell literally “turns a phrase” in virtual space. Janet Zweig’s “thanks a million” actualizes the saying, forcing the view to confront bodily what is so easily uttered, and Abby Donovan piles up Some of What Don Quixote Said, laying it out there for the viewer to ask, “What is in all these words, could the amount be more relevant than the syntactical meaning?” Is language, as Krisanamis proposes, its own galaxy of the insides of different “O’s” or a viral-like growth, as personified in Carson Fox’s flower arrangements that hint at a horribly unnatural nature?
A public reception will be held from 5-7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 22, in the University Gallery in Old College on the University of Delaware Newark campus.Click here to view a catalog of the exhibition.
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