"Speech is as complex as metabolism" (Neil V. Smith)

Artists claim the right to construct communicative and relational worlds that express themselves and engage with the public through often indirect and unquantifiable means. This exhibition brings together a small group of such artists who have consciously ventured to explore what lies behind that opaque mirror we call language. Whether written, spoken, embodied, spatial, visceral, material, sonic, or formed through any combination of these elements, each artist’s perspective creates a space to reflect on how we think, speak, express, describe, and signify.

Whether it is Watanabe’s multiple voices of out-loud reading recalling a time when the text was more physical; Opdyke’s machines of demagogic language; Villar’s corporeal tracing of urban surfaces closed off to the public; Freedman’s poignant conclusions drawn from literary “failures”; Tallichet’s condensed block cultures in urban symbolism; Jackson’s fusion of mark memory and message critique; the literal ingestion of text by the anonymous artist interviewed by Whitehead; or Galiena’s satire of pyramidal language structures, poking fun at the relationship between signifier, signified, and referent—this exhibition pulls at our assumptions from multiple directions, challenging the very conventions of how we communicate.

Luigi Negro