Type considers the gallery space as a blank, paper page and convenes text and language-based artworks by artists from across the globe. Replete with varying languages, the exhibition intends to speak linguistically, conceptually and physically in several ways.
The show adopts a salon style of presentation where text and language pieces by artists – in vinyl, neon, and paint – come to fill, and potentially engulf the gallery space. By including artworks that take the gallery wall as a ground – without other supporting structures such as paper, canvas or otherwise – the exhibition site itself becomes ever more charged as a framing device.
The centre of language formed by the exhibition alludes to the complexity of communication, with all its diverging and contrasting multiplicity of meaning, intent and purpose, while it attests to the art historical lineage of artists’ use of text. A separate yet overlapping field of interest is typography and its position as a visual language and graphic form of communication. The exhibition revels in type’s notions of arrangement and composition, structure,and appearance, as well as in its mode of projecting beyond its container to speak profoundly of political and social issues of our time.
Adam Carr
