From telegram to texting to status updates, language has evolved. Or regressed, depending on who you ask.
On Tuesday August 13, four artists—Barbara Miner, Barry Whittaker and Holly Hey of the University of Toledo and Lee Fearnside of Tiffin University—opened Transcending Text, an exhibit exploring the disconnection of text, language and meaning. The experience will run in the Walter E. Terhune Gallery at Owens Community College through a closing reception on Friday, August 30 from 5-7pm.
Each artist in Transcending Text offers a different style of installation, painting and moving image, all revolving around the nature of communication, language and text in various ways.
Lee Fearnside ripped pages from banned and challenged books to create 326 origami cranes as part of her installation confronting censorship. She set these cranes symbolically flocking in flight from the ground to the sky, allowing what was caged to be free. “To know that there are books that are being censored for various reasons means that those opportunities for empathy are being stripped away from people. Every book should have the opportunity to be read,” she said.
Holly Hey, a nationally screened filmmaker, imagined a child with two mothers, and questioned how it would communicate the difference between the two in her multi-media installation,“MOM MOM.” “What I want people to think about is the construction of the word mother, while simultaneously contemplating and confronting social, cultural and familial notions of the word,” she says. The piece is a “moving image loop” of two projected mediums: she superimposed hand scratched 16 mm film onto HD video images with the words “Mom Mom” echoing in the background.
Barry Whittaker is also a multi-media artist, whose art examines myth, language and miscommunication through digital and analog technologies. “[Communication] is the equivalent of deconstructing all one’s thoughts in a food processor and handing the pieces to one person who will deliver them to another person, who will reassemble them for the intended recipient of the message.” Whittaker said. “The hope is that he will get the idea of what is being said, but it is likely that important parts will be missing.” Raise your hand if you remember playing “telephone” as a kid.
Barbara Miner contributed paintings that graft text from their place within a word into the realm of abstract symbols. “When a letter or a pictograph is separated from the rest of the communication system, it becomes unintelligible and is cast adrift from concrete meaning like a discarded implement,” Miner said. The works that she is exhibiting have yet to be shown to the public.
Find the time to see these talented, nationally noticed artists daring you to question and become aware of how the world communicates. “My hope is that people can start to think about and question our relationship with text and language, that it is not as simple as we think. Language is something that defines us and defines our relationship with the world, but that relationship can be complicated and undermined,” Fearnside said.
Free and open to the public. Open from 9 am-5 pm until Friday, August 30.at the Walter E. Terhune Gallery of Owens Community College. Viewing of this exhibit is by appointment only, contact Lee Fearnside at (401) 338-6433 for scheduling. There will be a closing reception with the artists and light refreshments on August 30, the final day of the exhibit from, 5-7 pm.
