Word Pictures and Poem Objects
Curated by Christopher Squier
Amos Eno Gallery
Now Online through Artsy.netI am pleased to announce the inclusion of three of my House series paintings in an online exhibition that explores the relationship of art and language.
Word Pictures and Poem Objects is grounded in the work of artists and writers whose practices engage with the poetic and the plastic, inhabiting the interdisciplinary space between writing, speech, mark making, and epistolary abstraction.
The 43 pieces in the exhibition resist the impulse to simplify and explicate, combining text and imagery in contradictory and expansive elisions of meaning, wresting new ideas from the intersection of visual typography, lyric imaginaries, and the misunderstandings of one system of meaning merging with another…
The exhibition features 21 artists, some of whom also have roots in writerly communities as poets, lyricists, or critics while others have brought text into their visual works through everyday encounters with language.
– From Word Pictures and Poem Objects Text by Christopher Squier
The full exhibition text is available online and the works in the exhibition are for sale:
About the Paintings in the Exhibition
In my House series (1994–2017), I work on wood panels shaped in the iconic form of a house. These painted objects bring language into material form through stenciled words, symbolic imagery, and layered surfaces. The house is portrayed as a psychic space: a container for memory, interiority, and the unstable relationship between words, images, and lived experience.
Each work features stenciled words such as object, paradox, seeing, and moment. These words are straightforward and familiar, but I am interested in how unstable they become when they enter the space of a painting. Many of the panels in this series also include objects drawn from my recurring personal vocabulary: chairs, stools, flowers, snakes, apples, vases, and clocks. The relationship between word and image remains open, associative, and sometimes contradictory.
The series was informed by my reading of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, especially his understanding of the house as a site of memory, reverie, and psychic life. His title is important to me: the house is not only a place or an image, but a poetic structure, a form through which interior experience can be imagined, remembered, and spoken. In these works, language and image become two ways of approaching a shifting psychic space. Neither one fully explains the other; together, they create a field of associations.
The stenciled language has a plain, generic quality, like utilitarian public signage. But once painted, partially obscured, or absorbed into the surface, it becomes less stable. Object (1998) can be read as referring to a thing: ob-ject, or an action: ob-ject. The word is echoed across the surface with a roller brush, approaching semantic saturation, where a word is repeated until it becomes a meaningless sound pattern.
In Seeing Moment (2000), the overlapping words slow down recognition, while the bright flower at the center becomes a flashbulb moment of perception.
In Paradox (1999), the word hovers behind a serpent, an apple, and a vase of flowers. Like many of my works, this painting was shaped by reading, in this case Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, a text about how narratives around sexuality, freedom, and women’s social position are constructed and interpreted. Here, the house is a site of contention for inherited canonical texts.
These paintings are grounded in color, material, and the physical act of making. At the same time, they draw from reading, diary-writing, memory, and psychoanalysis. The objects in them function as psychic symbols: familiar things that carry unresolved emotional and associative charge. In relation to Word Pictures and Poem Objects, I see these works as painted objects where language, image, and material form meet without collapsing into a single meaning. They ask the viewer to read and look at the same time, and to remain with the ambiguities that arise between what a word says, what an image shows, and what a painting holds.
