Loud and Clear

We are pleased to announce Loud and Clear, a group exhibition of six artists: Jonathan Bonner, Pat Falco, Eric Lebofsky, Rachel Perry, Joe Wardwell, and Deb Todd Wheeler. Each artist introduces text uniquely into their art. Some use their work to convey a political message, some infuse the words with personal significance, and others simply appreciate the aesthetics of type.

Jonathan Bonner plays with the way text looks, seeing each letter as an object made of line and shape. His series, Poomagrams, creates monograms from Pooms(a single syllable poem). Bonner's Poomagrams transform letters into clever visual forms which reflect their meaning. In contrast, Pat Falco's paintings imply text through portraits of people on their phones, without incorporating it directly into his work. The distant expressions and downturned gazes of his characters portray the ironic way words can silence us as communication moves into the digital age. Eric Lebofsky's drawings of vinyl records are a callback to designs of the analog past. In a project running eleven years, his nostalgic renderings of album covers portray the range of emotional significance music and its lyrics can have, and act as a form of self-portraiture for the artist at different points in his life.

Rachel Perry records the music woven into her daily routines in her Soundtrack to my life. Each piece extracts lyrics from an entire song and assembles them in a collage of letters snipped from the junk mail and ads sent to her house, reconfiguring both the songs she chooses to hear, and the ads given to her unsolicited, into a new context. Joe Wardwell also appropriates text from music by composing one line snatches of songs in bright, bold lettering, playing against painterly renderings of American landscape. The scenes and lyrics are at odds, the words abstracting the landscape while landscape obscures the words. This juxtaposition creates a discourse between the two definitions of the nature of our nation: both its physical and cultural characteristics.

Deb Todd Wheeler's work interacts with the philosophy of text and the physical act of walking, suggesting that language is like a road. She presents an oak slab embedded video of a walk through the woods and an array of walking sticks engraved with fragments of text. Wheeler sees walking as a meditation; she invites the viewer to contemplate the words of Tim Ingold as they walk along her piece, using text as a vehicle for conveying specific ideas in her work.