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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.
Visionary Anatomies
September 19 – December 10, 2006
Curated by JD Talasek.
Visionary Anatomies brings together works by 11 contemporary artists who incorporate modern medical imaging into their work. X-rays, angiograms and other scientific images here assume a new meaning as the artist’s point of departure. Anatomical illustrations are manipulated in these photographs, paintings and mixed-media works to convey wider-ranging aesthetic, social and cultural concerns. The results, in the words of exhibition curator JD Talasek (a UD MFA and now Director of Exhibitions and Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences), “have the potential to remind us of our humanity and to keep alive our sense of wonder and awe.”
The exhibition includes works by Stefanie Bürkle, Katherine du Tiel, Tatian Garmendia, Joy Garnett, Connie Imboden, Predrag Pajdic, Katherine Sherwood, Frederic Sommer, Mike and Doug Starn and Richard Yard.
The opening for "Visionary Anatomies" is scheduled for Wednesday,
September 20, 2006 from 5-7 pm. The curator will give a talk
at 5 pm in the galleries, to be followed by a reception.
Katherine Du Tiel
MUSCLE / HAND
1994 • silver gelatin print
40" x 30"
Visionary Anatomies was created by the Office of Exhibitions and
Cultural Programs of the National Academny of Sciences and organized for travel by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES).
Play on Words
January 16 – March 21, 2007
Guest curated by Lance Winn
Department of Art and Visual Communications,
University of Delaware
Text-based art has historically been used as a symbolic carrier of meaning and/or an indexical kind of signifier for a “lifestyle” (think of the Cubist use of news, or the codification of graffiti as a mark since the 70’s). A new generation of artists is looking less at the meaning of language and more at how its physical form or way of being produced might impact understanding. These artists build with language and use it to generate new images and objects. They force an experiential rather than intellectual interpretation. Aware of the cultural signification of the language they work with, these artists deny its separation from physical context and aesthetic qualities. Language becomes a material rather than something we can count on to get a point across. At a time when so much of our language has become a catch-phrase these artists analyze text beyond cultural meaning, hoping to find a new contact with words through an altered relationship to what “means.”
The exhibition includes works by Xu Bing, Abby Donovan, Ken Fandell, Tony Hepburn, Nina Katchadourian, Brice Marden, Suzanne McClelland, Cy Twombly, Holland Williams, Sue Williams and Janet Zweig.
A schedule of events to be held in conjunction with the exhibitions is forthcoming.
For more information, or to schedule a guided tour, class or group visit, please contact the University Museums: 302-831-8037.
