Sign:Language
Machines With Magnets Art Space, April 2009

Last weekend was the opening of Sign:Language, my show with the fabulous Katie Truskoski and Sarah Clover at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket. It was fantastic to see the work up, the space packed, and the metaphors cranking effectively away in the art full of human and animal gestures, body language, sign painting and symbolism. Hecks yeah, we got it done.

I heaped a lot of importance onto my execution of this show. I'd been waiting a few years for the opportunity and the sheer space to create a real installation of my work, an immersive space in which the fragmented narrative of the work could flow and meander and be explored by the viewer, rather than being limited to discrete, individual paintings. And the heaping of importance begat the heaping of work, the heaping of work begat the trampling of deadlines, and I was working on these paintings at 8am Friday, ten hours before the show would open. If anyone strayed too close to the walls during that opening, they've taken away a souvenir in the form of stray yellow and burnt sienna oils on their Friday night clothes.

The installation is comprised of my now-usual birds, simultaneously emphatic and vague in their familiar physical expressions, paired with pieces of text-experiments with font and color inspired by everything from traditional sign painting to contemporary magazines and mixed with my own self indulgent letter games. I mean for the literal language of the words and the wordless language of the birds to work together to form a kind of story very much open to interpretation and re-interpretation, much as the day-to-day world stories us with every kind of language: body and gesture, snippets of conversation, the promises of signage, the knowing winks of light and strangers.

The following is the Jeanette Winterson quote, from Art and Lies, that I offered as my statement along with the work on the wall:

It isn't natural, language, nothing of nature in it, why pretend it so?

To match the silent eloquence of the created world I have had to learn to speak.

Jeanette Winterson has always been a huge inspiration to me, and another quote of hers had everything to do with my choice of the phrases almost formed by the words in this show:

How Shall I Live? The question presses on me through the thin pane. The question tails me through the dense streets. In the anonymous computer-face of the morning mail, it is the question only that I read in red ink, the question burning the complacent page.

How Shall I Live? The question daubed on the door-posts. The question drawn in the dust. The question hidden in the bowl of lilacs. The insolent question at a sleeping god. The question that riddles in the morning, that insinuates at noon. The question that drives my dreams to wakefulness, the question physical in beads of sweat. "Answer me" whispers the voice in the desert. The silent place where the city has not yet come.

I was driven to add text to my paintings came partly from my own mildly frustrated desire to write, but even more from my interest in sign painting and other forms of hand-written text scattered all over our built environment. I'm interested in the way that we're perpetually pummeled by messages and stories in the form of billboard and signage, advertising and name-tagging, and it occurred to me that the biggest difference in how this environmental language is posed and how our own internal dialogues read is the difference between an answer and a question. Advertising and signage make grandiose claims in asbsolute language; I was interested in taking this medium and its language repositioning it to form questions like those that we constantly re-hash internally.

I built my words off of the phrase "How shall we live" and associated questions, throwing in bits and pieces of various potential answers. My favorite of these answers, loosely related to life and how it might best be lived, is "There is Nothing To Fix"... a maxim that was written on a post it note stuck to the dash of Katie Truskoski's Subaru for an important week or two last summer.

So there it be. Some birds, some words, some pictures of relieved girls on opening night, unfixed and ready for more.