For Immediate Release Summer hours: Wednesday – Saturday 12-6 Exhibition dates: June 12 – July 26, 2008 Opening reception: June 12 from 6-8PM Idiolects Tauba Auerbach, Bradford Bailey, Brian Clifton, Peter Davies, Eoin Donnelly, Matteo Ghidoni, Lou Laurita, David Malek, Norm, Kay Rosen, Sam Porritt, Molly Springfield, Josh Tonsfeldt, Lily van der Stokker Curated by Lumi Tan Idiolects brings together a multi-generational group of artists who incorporate letters and words into their diverse practices with equal consideration of communicative language and aesthetic form. Text's typically explanatory or expository role is translated in order to be directly interpreted and instantly absorbed in the same way as image. The impact of the text becomes equivalent to that of the image, instilling new meaning into the most basic, quotidian symbols and tools of language. Each artist creates a system for thinking about the representation of text as inferred in the exhibition’s title, a term for an individual's personal language, their quirks, and their patterns. For Idiolects the artists create work that ranges from humorous to ominous, while remaining consistently democratic; the use of text facilitates an immediate connection to the viewer. Tauba Auerbach and Kay Rosen, two artists of different generations whose practices are centered on determined investigations of language, play with the uncanny way familiar phrases appear in contrast to how they sound. Also impeding legibility with color, space and pattern, Lou Laurita and Bradford Bailey obscure the text in their work but in opposing ways; Laurita’s graphic images of debauchery engulf the letters’ shapes, while Bailey's white words on white canvases test issues of reproduction and comprehension. Eoin Donnelly, David Malek, and Molly Springfield's works quote from seminal philosophical and theoretical texts directly, yet selectively reproduce covers, title pages and signature terms as to reinstate the heady prose into a distinctive image. Matteo Ghidoni chooses instead to reduce and reinterpret the plotline of J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise into highly stylized patterns, marks and numerals. This pliable and ambiguous nature of text is apparent in Brian Clifton's site-specific installations where paragraphs are isolated from their context, maximizing their impact, and made available to take away for the viewer's continued analysis. Lily van der Stokker's drawings, studies for her large wall paintings, engage with ideas of narrative small talk, akin to automatic doodles on a school notebook that are then replicated on an oversized scale. Similarly, while the substance of Peter Davies’s utterly subjective “Top One-Hundred” lists may change in the artist’s mind daily, these opinions become permanent and monumental in a painting. Josh Tonsfeldt's hypnotic video takes form from a transcript of a conversation with composer David Amram. Amram's words, randomly scrambled, are then re-read by his daughter, the jarring video edits controlled by her vocal cadences. With a simple change of angle, Sam Porritt's sculpture uses powerful symbols and transforms them into a clean, corporate signage. Norm, a Zurich-based graphics team co-founded by Manuel Krebs and Dimitri Bruni, work with typefaces as complex linguistic systems. For this exhibition they have made a series of cards with one letter printed of the eight most-used letters in the English language. Randomly placed in a pile for visitors to take, the cards will debut Norm’s new typeface called REPLICA. The dichotomy between showing and saying is an ongoing and irreconcilable challenge to artists. As what we read, say, engage with and process is encouraged to become a dialogue, these artists' use of language, text and symbols removes the singular interpretation of familiar language, creating the slippage and rifts between seeing, reading, and understanding. - Lumi Tan