Letters, Words, and Phrases

Letters, Words, and Phrases

presented by the art + art history department

Goucher College

R o s e n b erg G a l l e ry

“ Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain to yours without surgery.�

Mark Amidon

The use of language was a major part of cubism, futurism, Dada, and other avantgarde art movements. It was also important in pop art, which frequently incorporated advertising text and logos, and conceptual art, in which language often became the artwork itself. Words and images began to function interchangeably, breaking down distinctions between the two and creating a sort of synthesis.

Thus, language and image often oscillate in contemporary visual art, forcing the viewer to infer some basis for associating them.

Letters, Words, and Phrases is an exhibition that explores visual art’s ongoing engagement—and entanglement—with language, bringing together works by eight contemporary artists who use letters, words, and phrases as part of their work: sculptures by Ruth Bowler and R.L. Croft, photography by Susan Eder and Craig Dennis, mixed-media art by Cara Ober and Susan Brandt, prints by Rebecca Katz, and drawings by Julie Marie Geare and Molly Springfield.

Laura Amussen, curator

Ruth Bowler

Ruth Bowler is interested in examining the role language plays in power struggles between the self and others, and how language and communication create the foundation for human relationships.

Bowler’s sculpture and installation investigate letters and spaces, which are the elements used to build words and speech, as well as to identify and solidify personal and social position. And while, in many ways, language (with specific rules of grammar, syntax, etc.) is perceived as a standard measure, the meaning it communicates is subjective—what is said, heard, seen, and understood is unique to the individual.

Sedition, 2008 Hydrocal on painted wood 4’ x 8’x 6”

Susan Brandt

Susan Brandt often uses words and lettering in her work to express and elicit strong emotion. Language, as an auditory symbol, doesn’t always communicate the depth or process of an emotional experience—realization, memory, and recovery are only possible when time is added to the mix. Repetition hides subtle changes; simple becomes complex. Brandt challenges the viewer’s relationship with language and emotion.

Everything I know I learned from television, 2008 Acylic on Canvas 24” x18”

R. L. Croft

Platform Madrid, 2006 ferrous, nonferrous metals, fasteners, objects, nail polish bottles 97” x 32” x 10”

R.L. Croft has created ruins and relics using cannibalized consumer and industrial products from his more than 20 years as graphic designer.

Words, letters, or numbers appearing in wallworks and floorworks force analogies and suggest drawn elements. The “M� in Platform, Madrid, cut from a milk sign, alliteratively alludes to Metro, Madrid, mayhem, or murder. In the center of Fragment, aphasiac, gas station flip-sign zeroes suggest the eyes of a pictographic face in crisis.

Susan Eder and Craig Dennis

Susan Eder and Craig Dennis have spent over 32 years photographing clouds—their work addresses a universal tendency to tease meaning from abstraction and reflects the artists’ interest in how text and image overlap.

On one level, this series extends the tradition of nature photography by ambitiously documenting clouds that, fleetingly, resemble other things. Its larger intent is to explore the intrinsic perceptual biases (cultural, personal, physiological) that enable viewers to read water vapor as familiar, symbolic imagery.

Eder and Dennis use traditional film-based cameras, combined with digital output— their negatives and transparencies are scanned and reproduced as digital files. The artists do not fabricate the actual subject matter.

New Cloud Roman, 2005 LightJet print; montage of photos documenting actual cloud formations 30” x 36” Courtesy of Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC.

Julie Marie Geare pays attention to social and political issues while maintaining a deep understanding of visual concepts—she has a deep love for fine craftsmanship and subtle shifts in meaning. Geare wants her work to alter the viewer’s perception and incite a social dialogue about important and current discrimination.

Just 15 years ago, President Bill Clinton established a new law within the U.S. military referred to as “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (officially, United States Code, Chapter 37 of Title 10, Section 654). This purportedly protective policy bans GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender) people from serving in the military openly. Since 1993, over 12,500 servants of the U.S. military have been discharged as a result of this directive.

Geare’s current body of work addresses the discriminatory nature of the U.S. military’s laws, documents, and codes, and challenges the prejudices they encourage.

15 Years, 2009 pencil on hahnemule paper 20” x 29”

Julie Marie Geare

Rebecca Katz

Printmaker Rebecca Katz’s works on paper juxtapose images of animals with text that expresses human thoughts and sentiments. The images are humorous, but because the animals act as stand-ins for the artist, they are also more faithful than a traditional self-portrait—allowing Katz to explore and present her own idiosyncrasies.

How Am I Doing So Far? (series), 2007 screen print 34 “x 35“

Cara Ober

Cara Ober is a visual artist with a writer’s addiction to words. She uses specific texts and fonts in her work to suggest multiple narrative voices, perspectives, and time periods.

For Ober, words often seem to carry the weight of fact and authority, of history and truth. Closer inspection, however, reveals that words are often inadequate in expressing the complexity of experience and can also misinform, play tricks, and cause hilarity. Ober’s motives are to exploit the multiple meanings in one simple phrase and to expose the gap between meaning and language.

In her latest series of works on paper, Ober pairs phrases from Frank O’Hara poems with collaged images from antique newspapers and magazines. Rather than illustrating the text and producing literal and logical conclusions, the images create discord and contrast, suggesting multiple meanings and nonsensical outcomes.

Pretty Soon, 2009 Mixed media on paper 12” x 12”

Molly Springfield makes drawings and installations based on texts, especially those that recall specific and transformative moments in the history of images and ideas, such as the birth of photography in the 1830s or the emergence of conceptual art strategies in the late 1960s. Among other things, she is interested in oppositions between reproduction and originality, seeing and reading, technology and labor, and digital and analog.

The Future of Art, 2007 Graphite on paper 11” x 57” Courtesy of Thomas Robertello Gallery

Springfield’s recent projects include an ongoing series of drawings of photocopies of printed texts; a mixed-media project based on the life and writings of the 19th-century photography visionary William Henry Fox Talbot; an investigation into how handwritten marginalia reveals relationships between readers and books; and a visual “translation” of the first chapter of Swann’s Way in the form of drawings made from every existing English edition of Proust’s novel.

Molly Springfield

Letters, Words, and Phrases Monday, March 23, through Sunday, April 26, 2009 Artists’ reception: Thursday, April 9, 6 p.m.

The Rosenberg Gallery presents works by painter Cara Ober, printmaker Rebecca Katz, photographers Susan Eder and Craig Dennis, sculptors Ruth Bowler and R.L. Croft, and mixed-media artist Susan Brandt, and drawings by Julie Marie Geare and Molly Springfield in an exhibition that explores how letters, words, and phrases translate into visual ideas.

Directions

Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.

Gallery Hours

9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays.

Call 410.337.6333 for evening and weekend hours.

www.goucher.edu/rosenberg

C9394-03/09

The Rosenberg Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.