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Word on the Street: Image, Language, Signage

Featuring work by SUPERFLEX, Laura Kina, Chris Dorland, Mark Dean Veca, Joel Ross (with Jason Creps), Jason Thomas Pallas, Jaclyn Jacunski, Peter Liversidge, Jeffrey T. Jones, Jonathan Monk, Eric May, Steve Lambert, Nicolas Lampert, Justseeds, and Howling Mob Society. Also featuring artists' books from the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection. 

This exhibition considers the expressive potential of image and language through signage: how do artists use the visual and physical characteristics of signage, along with its often site specific cultural currency, to create realms of poetic or political meaning in public space or the gallery? With a focus on forms of permanent and ephemeral signage this exhibition will consider artists' billboards, marquees, street signs, banners and posters among other forms of infrastructural signage.

Held in association with the THIRD ANNUAL TYPOGRAPHY SYMPOSIUM, a four-day extravagana celebrating typography and design, featuring signmaking workshops, a lecture by John Downer, and a panel on Chicago street typography. 

Image credit: Superflex, BankWest acquired by Commonwealth Bank of Australia, October 9th, 2008 (from the Bankrupt Banks series); courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Word on the Street shows exactly how “show” tells: how things and contexts, old, new and remixed, can be structured to speak: how a Plymouth Road Runner hood can be coaxed into a nostalgic ventriloquism on American road culture; how, shorn of their textual anchors, corporate logos speak graphically of a movement and grace that is unavailable in their original designs; how authorized and “unauthorized” signs can speak a tale of resistance and counter-hegemony by their very presence or re-presentation; and how mundane phrases, objects and products find their poetic voice in a new rhetoric of display.  

—From Display and the Multivocal Rhetoric of Places and Things, a catalog essay by Ward Tietz


Select Images

 
Jonathan Monk, Rew-Shay Hood Project XIV (Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York)



Laura Kina, Okinawa - All American Food (Courtesy the artist)



Nicholas Lampert, Warning Signs (Courtesy the artist)