When Corner'd Use The Wall
Recent work by Jonny Farrow
February 4 - April 14
Reception: February 20, 5-7 p.m.
Image: Image from Jonny's Exhibition
Artist Statement
When Corner'd Use The Wall, refers to the situational, strategic, and material improvisations used to create the works in this show. Comprised of found-objects assembled and placed in relation with other artist-made objects, the sculptures are a product of slippages, failures of meaning, purposeful mis-hearings, mis-readings and odd juxtapositions. This failure of meaning is the playful heart of this show—not to frustrate viewers, but to allow them to find their own meanings in the individual works and the works in relation to one another. One could say they are pieces from different puzzles that may or may not form a stable image when assembled. The works and their relationships are multi-valent by design.
This Is Reading
Recent work by Jill Magi
January 27 - April 6
Reception: February 20, 5-7 p.m.
Image: Painting from a series titled 'Taken from this Page'
Artist Statement
Inspired by 18th and 19th century fabric sample books, and based on her own most-recent book entitled SPEECH, Jill Magi's exhibition “This Is Reading” is an encounter with reading and writing as textile and text—shape, color, feeling, and impression. In sample books from around the world, and in medieval and early modern European scripts, lettering mimics thread, and what looks like contemporary abstraction is centuries-old mercantile arrangements of fabric swatches. Whereas reading is usually thought of as an act of consumption—the individual reader “getting” something from a text—Magi's recent paintings and book objects invite a multi-directional exchange of sensation between art, book, and audience. Her work refigures writing as well, where composition is an act of sampling other texts, returning the author to pre-modern scribe and language as shared. Therefore, in our current age where screens and summaries dominate, often shortcutting the material and slow experience of text, “This Is Reading” argues for embodied reading and writing: away from consumer models and toward the analogue glow of authorship shared and authentic because it occurs moment-by-moment and never alone.