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Word on the Street: Image, Language, Signage
JUNE 14 - AUGUST 10, 2013
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 5:0–7:00 P.M.
Superflex, Laura Kina, Chris Dorland, Mark Dean Veca, Joel Ross, Jason Thomas Pallas, Jaclyn Jacunski, Peter Liversidge, Jeffrey T. Jones, Jonathan Monk, Eric May, Steve Lambert, and Nicolas Lampert, Justseeds, Howling Mob Society
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.
In association with the THIRD ANNUAL TYPOGRAPHY SYMPOSIUM, featuring sign making 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.
Exerpted from Display and the Multivocal Rhetoric of Places and Things, a catalog essay by Ward Tietz
