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"Textually Speaking"
As I was on my way to this show, I tried to send a text message with the word home in it, but my phone’s T9WORD function came up with good instead. Guess what: Technology isn’t perfect. Such are the mundane insights in “Textually Speaking,” which relies on vague and facile observations.
The most obvious case is Nate Larson’s storyboardlike photographic musings, which contemplate the existence of people in cyberspace who share the same name, among other coincidences. (Anyone who’s done a self-Google search has discovered this phenomenon.) Rachel Foster’s framed letterpress prints examine text and translation: In one of them, Foster notes that T9WORD even guesses the first lines of Genesis wrong. Looks like God isn’t in the machine.
If the show’s artists are tackling any substantive concepts, their arbitrary use of materials only hinders their ideas. Steve Panella doodles the letters O, I, C and Y over old dictionary pages for reasons that never become clear. Monika Wulfers takes phrases spoken by a patient who suffered a severe chemical imbalance after brain surgery and silk-screens them onto sheets of glass. These pieces look like corporate-office decorations, not signposts on a harrowing journey of recovery.
“Textually Speaking” had the potential to ask original questions. Too bad it just skims the surface of text-based art.
