Words may be used to document, express,
affirm, condemn, persuade or warn, even through a simple medium like a text
message. All the while, these communications may be trivialized or misused.
Through the interpretations of 25 international artists using multiple mediums,
the JMKAC’s main gallery exhibits artwork addressing the nature of language.
Wisconsin’s Anne Kingsbury
ornately embellishes a page from a personal journal documenting her daily
activities in Beaded Journal.
Painstaking embroidery details a coverlet in a literal Thirty-Foot To-Do List by Melissa Damasauskas. These fiber arts
demonstrate the time required by life’s everyday activities, even mundane
events like writing down a grocery list.
In the multilayered Dream Paper, California’s
Shana Lutker records her dreams on newsprint resembling The New York Times and places the documents around a table, so that
viewers may peruse her nighttime thoughts. Love
Songs: Multi-Story House, an installation (resembling a small tool shed)
constructed by Mary Kelly and Ray Barrie, allows viewers to walk inside a
structure and read fragments of personal quotations that revisit the feminist
movement as perceived by women around the world.
These interactive and visually
stimulating artworks, which include images, paintings, photographs, sculptures
and even an enormous wall curtain, focus attention on the transmission of
language within contemporary culture and how it affects modern life. While
observing the works, one can’t help but wonder how to better use this powerful
tool so often taken for granted.
“A Torrent of Words” continues through May 30 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
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