Letters, Words, and Phrases

Release date: March 23, 2009 |

Letters, Words, and Phrases, an exhibition exploring the incorporation of language into visual art, will be presented in Goucher College’s Rosenberg Gallery from Monday, March 23, through Sunday, April 26.

The exhibit, which is free to the public, can be viewed weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and during scheduled events at Kraushaar Auditorium. An artists’ reception will be held Thursday, April 9, at 6 p.m. in Rosenberg Gallery. Call 410-337-6333 for more information.

The exhibition examines the interplay between visual art and language through the drawings of Julie Marie Geare and Molly Springfield and the works of photographers Craig Dennis and Susan Eder, mixed-media artists Susan Brandt and Cara Ober, printmaker Rebecca Katz, and sculptors Ruth Bowler and R.L. Croft.

The artists use language in their works in a variety of ways, including as social and political commentary, for aesthetic purposes, and to reflect something personal.

Julie Marie Geare uses fine craftsmanship and subtle shifts in meaning to alter a viewer’s perception. Her current body of work addresses the discriminatory nature of the U.S. military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and challenges the prejudices it encourages. Geare’s work forces the viewer to contemplate the injustices of the policy and offers the reverse response “Do ask, do tell.”

Molly Springfield’s drawings and installations are based on texts that recall specific and transformative moments in the history of images and ideas, such as the invention of photography. She is interested in oppositions between reproduction and originality, seeing and reading, technology and labor, and digital and analog. Her recent projects include an investigation into how handwritten marginalia reveals relationships between readers and books and a visual translation of the first chapter of Swann’s Way in the form of drawings made from every existing English edition of Marcel Proust’s novel.

Craig Dennis and Susan Eder have spent more than 32 years photographing clouds that resemble other objects. The resulting work explores the human tendency to find meaning in abstraction and reflects the artists’ interest in the overlap between text and image. Their work explores the intrinsic perceptual biases (cultural, personal, and physiological) that enable viewers to see familiar images in clouds, revealing nature as a vast arena for interpretation.

Susan Brandt uses words and lettering in her mixed-media works to express and elicit strong emotion. Her work challenges the viewer’s relationship with language and emotion. In her pieces, seeming repetition obfuscates subtle changes, and what seems to be simple becomes complex.

Cara Ober’s narrative works use specific texts and fonts to suggest multiple narrative voices, perspectives, and time periods. In her latest series of works on paper, she pairs phrases from Frank O’Hara’s poems with collaged images from antique newspapers and magazines. The images create discord and contrast with the text, suggesting multiple meanings and nonsensical outcomes rather than a literal or logical one.

Printmaker Rebecca Katz is intrigued by the potential complexity of the inner lives of animals and juxtaposes images of animals with text that expresses human thoughts and sentiments. She uses humor to illustrate the incongruity between image and text. Katz also uses animals as a stand-in for herself to show her own idiosyncrasies.

Ruth Bowler’s sculptures and installations examine letters and spaces and how they are used to identify and strengthen personal and social position. Her interest in language stems from her desire to examine power over the self and others, differentials, exchanges, and struggles.

R.L. Croft cobbles together consumer and industrial products from his more than 20 years as a graphic designer to form fragments of absurdity and tragicomedy. Words, letters, or numbers appearing in wallworks and floorworks force analogies and suggest drawn elements. The “M” in Platform, Madrid, cut from a milk sign, alliteratively alludes to Metro, Madrid, mayhem, or murder. In the center of Fragment, aphasiac, gas station flip-sign zeros suggest the eyes of a pictographic face in crisis.