by Lisa Mikulski
As a writer, I love the power of words but I will freely admit, there are times when the words we write, read and speak can seem like a minefield of misinterpretation or a source for derision. This has never been truer than in today’s social and political climate.
“Words Bite,” now showing at Hallspace Gallery, is an exhibition focusing on the language we use and how we interpret what we hear, say and read. While the pieces in the show focus on text, gallery owner John Colan warned me that it’s not just about typography or graphic design. The show presents the work of four artists and designers: Walter Kopec, John Kramer, Tony Schwensen and Maggie Stark, who explore language using the mediums of, yes, graphic design, but also neon work, performance and video.
Maggie Stark, a sculptor who works with light, glass and video, discussed her piece, Boomerang: “The words, ERRORS – ARROWS – EROS, link together to create a linear loop or a boomerang. Neon seems an appropriate medium in a show about words. Much as words articulate sound, the neon tube articulates light, encasing the immaterial, giving it meaning.”
Walter Kopec, a designer and artist, plays with words, puzzle-making, and letterform manipulation asks the viewer, “To think about the potential double meanings, cronies, doublespeak, hypocrisy and innuendo conveyed through carefully parsed language; and sometimes to recognize that people often do not mean what they say, and in fact, can sometimes mean the opposite.”
Interdisciplinary artist, Tony Schwensen, offers thought on American political rhetoric, “Something that I have witnessed over the past nearly ten years living in the United States (I am Australian) is how these ideas of manifest destiny, American freedom and American exceptionalism are present in art and cultural production in general. Indeed, from my perspective they form the basis on which art history is taught in art schools and how art is understood in the U.S.”
Not all the artists here chose to express global language or political rhetoric. Designer John Kramer’s work is work done to express a personal journey and his own mortality. He explained that his piece, Words to Live By, has “the bite of submission rather than the bite of resistance.”
“I just want to recognize that given the opportunity to use my voice in an art — and thus in a public context, that I chose to reflect on issues of interior, rather than global significance. All the word groupings in the piece have mortality as their subtext. I recognize that my own mortality is of little consequence, but maybe it is a place to start.”
(“Words Bite” runs through January 13, 2018 at Hallspace Gallery 950 Dorchester Ave., Dorchester, Mass. the gallery is open Friday and Saturday from noon-5 p.m. and Monday through Friday by appointment. For more information call (617) 288-2255 or visit http://www.hallspace.org/.)
Gabrielle Rossmer
Finding Truth In The Shadows
by Elizabeth Michelman
“Rigid Mobility,” a solo sculpture exhibition by Gabrielle Rossmer at HallSpace, consists largely of open space, broken up by seven polychromed pillars strategically dispersed throughout the gallery. Almost entirely composed of pedestal, they grow upward from a flared foot to culminate at eye-level in stacks of geometric forms pregnant with biomorphic softness. The gallery walls are sparsely punctuated by a handful of shelves holding diminutive representations of body parts.
The focal objects surmounting the pillars appear themselves to be similar to abstract pedestals — bulky towers of angular and rounded forms: bulbous toruses, chunky slabs, oversized hex-nuts, chamfered cubes and chopped-off pyramids. Some of them, composed of repetitions of flattened pyramids alternately pointing upward and downward, quote the endless columns and clashing forms associated with the seminal modernist Constantin Brancusi. The heavy masses and firm contours are occasionally relieved by indentations at the edges, spaces between the elements and flaws in the casting. The continuous painted skin deliberately reinforces a structural ambiguity as to where the “pedestal” leaves off and the “sculpture” begins.
To read more, pick up a copy of our latest issue! Click here to find a pick-up location near you or Subscribe Here.