Non-text

AN EXHIBITION OF TEXT AS IMAGE UNIVERSITY GALLERY, EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 30 – DECEMBER 11, 2013 TARBLE ARTS CENTER, EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, JANUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 23, 2014

introduction

BY LESLIE ATZMON Bee’s collaboration “Disfrutelos” are word-gestures on paper that put pressure on how we comprehend amalgams of visual and literary narrative. Christopher Baker’s motion graphic, “It’s Been a Long While Since I Last Wrote,” weighs the protracted permanence of handwriting against the fast-paced fleetingness of digital information. The material and formal qualities of Kyle Daevel’s “Detroit Alphabet” and Todd Childers’ “Ironically Digital Type” convey the artists’ accounts of Detroit’s shrinking population and the visual continuity of typographic forms, respectively. Keetra Dixon’s “Throughout” and “The Great Delusion” embody what Dixon calls “the flick” between clarity and confusion.

Letters and words operate visually as well as semantically. Strictly speaking, both are abstract visual forms that represent spoken (or written) verbal forms. In fact, scholars who study ancient alphabets believe that western alphabetic characters originated as pictograms—simple images that represent ideas or things—that eventually evolved into a set of abstract symbols representing the sounds of spoken language.

Yet in Western culture, our awareness of this imagebased ancestry has been lost, and letterforms and words typically are understood as transparent carriers of verbal content.

We chose “Non-Text” as a title for this show because we wanted to activate the possible meanings of context and nonsense. We also wanted a neologism that challenges transparent meaning. The work in “Non-Text” calls into question the Western cultural assumption that textual content is necessarily the primary and most efficient communication medium; this art wittingly or unwittingly uses textual media in ways that obscure written language’s ability to communicate. Each piece employs text, typography, or writing to create aesthetic forms that express visual meaning rather than merely allowing words to function as invisible verbal transmitters.

Lance Winn’s “Three Views of Nothing,” “Flood,” and “Life on Mars” present typography as topography, while Ryan Molloy and Jim Steven’s “writing wall” builds textual content from architectural materials and structures. Seth Ellis’ “Meanwhile” and Amanda Katz’s “Azimuth” each encourage viewers to participate in the meaning-making process—the former through physical manipulation of the piece by viewers, and the latter through viewer immersion into the projection of the work. In “Short Words with Tower,” “Idle Tower,” and “Blind Side Tower,” Justin Quinn demonstrates the complex communication that can be generated using a series of E’s.

Reading their statements, it becomes clear that the “Non-Text” artists are challenging conventional narrative, communication, and reading practices. In “Flank” and “Fardel,” John Adelman reworks excerpts from the 1979 Webster’s Unabridged Encyclopedic Dictionary until they are read as shape and texture.

Like Adelman, in “An Exquisite Morass” Liese Zahabi reconfigures Google news into dramatic kaleidoscopic patterns that challenge how we access information.

Brian Kim Stefans’ poetry-in-motion piece “Suicide in an Airplane,” likewise reshapes “the news” to create a playfully irreverent story.

Each of the letters in our alphabet has a distinctive, recognizable shape that allows it to function as part of a communication system. But letterforms and the words they create have visual qualities beyond these recognizable shapes—curved parts, straight lines, open areas, color, texture, stroke width, size, proportion, and visual weight. These qualities can vary dramatically, and the letters and words they shape make meaning in concert with the visual contexts in which the letters and words function. The work in “Non-Text” propels viewers into situations in which letters and words unabashedly become visual experiences.

Caroline Bergvall’s “Philomena (Working the Line),” Charles Bernstein’s “Veil,” and Bernstein and Susan

1

curators BIOGRAPHIES

Leslie Atzmon is Professor of Graphic Design and Design History at Eastern Michigan University.

Atzmon received her M.F.A. in graphic design at EMU and her Ph.D. in design history at Middlesex University in London, England. Atzmon’s work includes both visual and scholarly projects. She has published essays in international journals and has recently edited the collection Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design (Parlor Press, 2011). Atzmon is currently co-editing The Graphic Design Reader (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press in 2014) with Professor Teal Triggs of The Royal College of Art in the UK, and Encountering Things (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press in 2015) with Professor Prasad Boradkar of Arizona State University.

Brian Spolans is an artist and educator based in Southeast Michigan. His work has been exhibited at 500X Gallery in Dallas, Gallery Aferro in New Jersey, Bridge for Emerging Contemporary Arts Gallery in New Orleans, International Print Center of New York, and his work was published in New American Paintings (2008).

Spolans was a collaborator at Gallery Project gallery, which was located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Gallery Project was a fine arts collaborative that featured themed work by emerging artists. In 2011 Spolans co-curated the exhibit “Post Apocalypse” (http:// arthopper.org/a-world-beyond-prediction-postapocalypse-the-gallery-project/) with Gallery Project founders Rocco Depietro and Gloria Pritschet. The exhibit featured more than 30 local, regional, and national artists whose work considered the theme Post-Apocalypse—or life after life-altering events.

The work in “Post Apocalypse” explored the theme in humorous and emotional ways and from personal to global perspectives. The exhibition ran from December 14th until January 22nd, 2011.

Spolans is currently an Assistant Professor and Printmaking Area Coordinator at Eastern Michigan University.

In 2010, Atzmon and colleague Ryan Molloy cocurated “Open Book,” an exhibition of experimental books (http://openbookexhibit.com/). For the exhibition—which ran at Eastern Michigan University’s University Gallery from April 3, 2010 to June 15, 2010— they defined the term “book” loosely as a vehicle for information that is organized into “sections.” This exhibition featured the work of an international group of architects, artists, designers, and poets. The “Open Book” exhibition was reviewed in the May 2011 issue of Sculpture magazine. Atzmon and Molloy were recently awarded a $35,000 NEA Art Works Design grant to support the design and production of a highend catalogue for the exhibition that will also include seven critical essays on the history and future of the book. Atzmon will serve as editor and co-designer of the catalogue.

2

CURATORIAL STATEMENTS

of the work obscured or sublimated the verbal content. Bringing together our two complementary approaches created a compelling joint vision for the show in which the visual and material aspects of the work in “Non-Text” enhance, sublimate, obscure or reshape the textual content. I also want to thank Brian’s two boys for their help as silent collaborators in this vision.

Language is typically used as a means to clarify and communicate concepts as specifically as possible.

Letters, text, and words are some of the tools that language uses to represent these concepts, but are often overlooked due to the large volume of them consumed everyday. The work in this exhibition softens language’s ability to communicate and gives precedence to the tools themselves over the concepts they represent.

“Non-Text” features art and design that pressures the relationships between textual and visual media.

The work that we selected for this exhibition tampers with text in order to obfuscate or transfigure written content. In Western culture, text and verbal language are typically used to clarify and communicate concepts. The visual language of the work in this exhibition actively subverts this default privileging of written and verbal language, and in the process undermines our dependence on the meaning-making functions of verbal communication. For “Non-Text” we looked for designers, artists, architects, and poets who create unexpected contexts for verbal language, and in doing so give top billing to visual language.

— Leslie Atzmon

As a father of two small boys who are learning to read and identify letters, the structure of language is a common theme in my day-to-day life. From the proper direction of letters, to the phonetic sounds, to being able to identify words by sight, the rules of the English language are frequently discussed at my house. So it’s refreshing to witness the work of artists who are considering these rules as an opportunity for irreverent play, or as “laws” to be subverted.

— Brian Spolans While Brian Spolans is a printmaker, I am a graphic designer, and our two disciplines tend to see letterforms very differently. So when Brian approached me to co-curate an exhibition about the ways that type and text make visual meaning, I was intrigued. By working with him, I learned that while I am drawn to type and letters as visual entities that convey meaning independent of their semantic message, Brian was interested in projects for “Non-Text” in which the visual or formal qualities

We’d like to thank The Provost’s Office, the Art Department, and the Art Department Galleries at EMU for their support for the “Non-Text” exhibition and catalogue. Thanks also to EMU Art Department Gallery Director Gregory Tom and Eastern Illinois University, Tarble Arts Center Director Michael Watts.

— Brian Spolans and Leslie Atzmon

3

non text

BY ELLEN LUPTON This essay contains 5,456 illustrations—that’s counting all the characters on the page. Every letter, every comma, every dot at the close of a sentence is a picture of sorts, representing a fragment of sound or signaling a structural break in the flow of language. In the normal experience of reading, we rarely pause to contemplate the physical shape or assigned meaning of individual glyphs. Indeed, when we focus our eyes on the ribbon-like curves of a Garamond “a” or the quirky front leg of Helvetica’s “R,” we are no longer reading in the normal sense at all. We are watching language with the sound turned off.

remains a matter of scientific and ideological debate, but it is well established that once we internalize literacy as a skill, we fly through text, absorbing the flood of discrete characters in bigger chunks. The letters remain, but their individual identity recedes.

Every typographer knows this. Designing a typeface—or just choosing one to use in your own project—demands looking at how glyphs sit together and form into words and sentences and columns of text. A type design begins with individual characters, but its life or death depends on how those characters play together. Different typefaces turn the same words into different pictures. The remarkable web app Wordmark (http://wordmark.it/), created by Turkish designer Fahri Özkaramanlı, loads every typeface currently active on the user’s computer, allowing users to type a short text into the browser and quickly see and compare those words in dozens of different typefaces. Try it with your own name to experience the internal specificity and potential variety of a wordmark. Nabokov famously savored the sound of Lolita’s name and the way it felt in his mouth: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Lolita’s visual silhouette is equally seductive, rising and falling in short spikes around her low soft curves. (She looks younger and prettier in lowercase: lolita.)

This essay contains 1,048 images—that’s counting each word. Words are the building blocks of speech.

The letters of the alphabet are an analysis, an abstraction, a decomposition of natural wholes into artificial parts. When reading a familiar language, we ignore writing’s false division of text into separate slivers of sound. Slow down and observe your experience of reading this text. You are grasping whole words and clumps of words, making forests out of trees. Each word is a picture, its ascenders and descenders, its curves and angles, coming together in a unique profile.

Experts in the teaching of reading have long battled over the value of “phonics” versus “whole language” in helping young children learn to read. Phonics instruction emphasizes the sounds of letters (“A is for apple”), while the whole language method seeks to repeat particular words over and over so that children become familiar with their overall shapes.

Which method is more useful for early learners

My own memory of learning to read revolves around the precisely labeled universe of Richard Scarry’s Busy Town. Every creature, place, and wheeled conveyance in Busy Town has its own name, written down in 14 pt. Century Expanded. As a child I could

4

read the words, but I could also read the pictures.

Scarry scattered his simple pen-and-wash drawings across the page, separating them with white space: sports car, school bus, station wagon; farmer, nurse, taxi driver. Sometimes, he placed his objects onto tilted spaces with an even scale from front to back, bottom to top—an encyclopedia of kitchen tools, for example, occupies the wondrous white countertop of Richard Scarry’s kitchen. Scarry arranged images like words, creating a magically legible world.

ubiquitous convention of Western typography. The indent replaced ¶, a concrete symbol lodged in the text with no space around it. Indents let some air in the room, allowing readers to see their content in smaller units. Alas, as the curtains closed on the last millennium, along came HTML, whose pesky <p> element adds space around every paragraph, padding our browsers with wasted white space and relegating the elegant, efficient indent to a tricky work-around mastered by only the most finicky web typographers.

This essay has 6,491 images—including the spaces between words. Without those spaces, the wordmarks would mash against their neighbors and form a faceless crowd. Such spaces don’t happen when we speak. (Stop and listen; you can’t hear them.) Spaces didn’t exist in the earliest uses of the Greek alphabet, but scribes soon discovered that putting a gap between words made text easier to comprehend. More silent sisters soon entered the scene, their movements becoming a codified and rule-bound ballet with the rise of print. After the Renaissance, marks of punctuation and differences such as UPPERCASE/lowercase and roman/italic became standard features of written communication.

We’d be lost today without them.

What is non-text? Artists and designers have long explored the pictorial potential of the written word.

The works catalogued on the following pages confront writing as a visual phenomenon. They implore us to seek out “visual meaning” in place of “verbal structures,” to receive aesthetic experiences in place of a written messages. In these works, letters becomes textures, patterns, and sculptures made of wax. They form fragile skylines, alien landscapes, and characters in a fairy tale. They splinter, shatter, bend, and overlap. And yet readers—indoctrinated by the regime of the alphabet for as long as we can remember—can never fully deactivate writing’s verbal will. Literacy dominates our consciousness.

“A” will always be for “apple.” Writing’s shape and texture insinuates itself into certain registers of the mind, imploring to be decoded, begging to be heard even when reading becomes impossible. Making typography shut up is a difficult task indeed. That difficulty, that tension between seeing and reading, is what the work collected here seeks so hard to exploit.

Paragraphs are pictures, too. We don’t speak in paragraphs. (I’ve met some people who barely speak in sentences.) A paragraph is a literary convention, a rhetorical nicety designed to make the experience of reading a bit more endurable. What is a paragraph, anyway? You’ll know one when you see one. (This essay has eight.) Since the seventeenth century, the indent (paired with a line break) has been a

5

brian KIM stefans right: “Suicide In An Airplane (1919),” Flash/algorithmic animation, 2010

6

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY

The “Scriptor” series is meant to bring some freeform doodling into the digital world. For the project, I created my own letterform creation program that purposefully lacks many of the elements of professional graphics programs such as Illustrator and Flash that encourage symmetry, cut-andpaste, and the mathematically precise placement of objects that we associate with digital design, not to mention much digital art. These letterforms and doodles are all done by hand, and by eye — they are a version of penmanship for the screen, but one in which each line or stroke of the letterform can be animated algorithmically (something you can’t do with standard fonts). The words themselves are parsed from news articles; interesting phrases are randomly picked out, given randomly generated sizes, placements and trajectories, as well as a crazy level (that’s the name of the variable in the program) that determines their legibility.

Brian Kim Stefans teaches literature and new media studies at UCLA. His current projects include a theory of digital textuality based on his series Third Hand Plays written for the SFMoma blog, a tentative foray into Speculaive Realist poetics, an historical anthology of Los Angeles poetry and Scavenged Luxury, an online “freeware” anthology of Los Angeles post-punk from roughly 1977-87. “The Dreamlife of Letters,” “Kluge: a meditation,” and “Suicide In An Airplane (1919),” along with other digital, video and graphic works, can be viewed at: www.arras.net. He has published several books of poetry and criticism, most recently Viva Miscegenation (MakeNow Press, 2012). He lives in Hollywood.

7

cAROLINE BERGVALL right: “Philomena (working the line),” ink and graphite, 10 x 10”, 2012

8

ARTIST STATEMENT Graphite and ink drawings as well as collages have for a long time been preparatory elements leading to the creation of some of my longer text pieces.

Through these I am able to devise some of the compositional aspects of the piece I’m writing and explore analogically some of its syntactical and narrative possibilities. This practice has also enabled me to find a relaxed entry into a piece of work. My books all contain reproductions of such prep pieces as they are an insistent aspect of my process. The tracings explicitly bring a physical, gestural and pulsional rhythm to my work.

Highly intelligent and beautiful Athenian princess, voyage across the sea to visit sister, rape by brotherin-law, mutilation and silencing by having tongue cut off, emprisonment, taught how to weave by guardian, from tongue to thread: learns new lines to tell her story, sends tapestry to sister who frees her, gory revenge banquet (this is where versions vary), transformation into nightingale. My main interest so far has been around her violent excision from language and the development of her survival language, a new physical articulacy manifested through the weaving of a tapestry. I have had it in mind since starting on this project that I want to write an aria, an aria for unvoiced singing, an aria for woven voice.

“Philomena (working the line)” is based on lines 1106-1107 of Chretien de Troyes’ version of the story: “et commence avec grande application/son ouvrage telle qu’elle l’entend.” The drawings shown here are two out of four of the very first from a project started in 2012. This larger work-in-progress already involves several series of drawings as well as visual and textual notes. It is based on the violent Ovidian story of Philomela in the Metamorphosis.

It was a much adapted story in medieval culture and I have been using it mainly it in its Old French Chretien de Troyes version (Philomena) and its Chaucer adaptation. In short her story goes like this:

9

BIOGRAPHY Caroline Bergvall is a writer and artist of FrenchNorwegian origins based in London. She works across art forms, media and languages. Bergvall is a strong exponent of writing methods that are adapted to contemporary audiovisual and contextual concerns and to multilingual identities. Her language-based pieces and microstructures frequently revisit literary models and tackle historical and political events.

Bergvall’s projects alternate between printed texts and work on paper, large spatial installations, live performances (often in collaboration), audio works and internet-based pieces. She has exhibited/ performed in a number of venues in the UK and internationally, including MOMA (NY), The South Bank Centre (London), DIA Arts Foundation (NY), MCA (Denver), Fundacio Tapiès (Barcelona), Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol), MCA (Antwerp), MACBA (Barcelona), Tate Modern (London), The Powerplant Gallery (Toronto). Latest outputs include, Meddle English (Nightboat Books, 2011), catalogue Middling English (John Hansard Gallery, 2011) and a DVD of her installation works: “GH<>ST PIECES: 4 language-based installations” (John Hansard Gallery, 2012). “DRIFT,” her collaborative live performance for voice / percussion / electronic text, inspired by an Anglo-Saxon poem, is forthcoming as a book with Nightboat in 2014. Bergvall was awarded the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Poetry and Drama 2012-13 at the University of Cambridge.

BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Charles Bernstein is author of Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays & Inventions (University of Chicago Press, 2011), All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). From 1978-1981 he co-edited, with Bruce Andrews.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. In the 1990s, he cofounded and directed the Poetics Program at the State University of New York – Buffalo. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Donald T. Reagan Professor of English and Comparative Literature and co-director of PennSound <writing. upenn.edu/pennsound>. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.

“Veil” is my most visually oriented work. The visual emblem is produced by several layers of overtyping, so that much, but not all, of the freely composed writing is obliterated. One model I had was Morris Louis’ “Veil” paintings, where successive stains of color occlude the inner layers, though at the edges the brightest of the suppressed underlayers of color shine through, ecstatically.

10

The sense of stain, as in soiling, and its associated sadness, is crucial; but also, as in biochemistry, the stain allowing you to identify otherwise invisible substances. In this sense, my poetry is an acoustic staining.

In the Hawthorne story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the minister who veils his face gives an explanation that I use as the epigraph for the book: “There is an hour to come when all of us shall cast aside our veils. Take it not amiss, beloved friend, if I wear this piece of crape till then.” Our language is our veil, but one that too often is made invisible.

Yet, hiding the veil of language, its wordness, its textures, its obstinate physicality, only makes matters worse. Perhaps such veils will be cast aside in the Messianic moment, that utopian point in which history vanishes. On this side of the veil, which is our life on earth, we live within and among the particulars of a here (hear) and now (words that speak of and to our condition of everydayness).

Charles bernstein left: “Veil,” pages from book, 8.5 x 11”, seven pages, 1987

11

SUSAN BEE right: “Disfrutelos” (with Charles Bernstein), ink drawing, typewriter, and collage on paper, 8.5 x 11’’, nine pages, 1977

12

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY

Both “Veil” and “Disfrutelos” are typewriterbased works. In “Disfrutelos” (1977), Charles and I combined hand drawn images and lines, which I drew, with lines of typewritten letters and collaged pieces of typewriter cover-up correction strips (bringing to mind Charles’s “Lift-Off,” from the same period, which was made entirely using Selectric typewriter correction tape). We were planning to publish the collaboration as a small book, but we never did, so it exists as a one-of-a-kind work.

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in New York City. She has had six solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, and has published many artist’s books including collaborations with Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, Susan Howe, Regis Bonvicino, Jerry Rothenberg, and Jerome McGann. Bee is the coeditor with Mira Schor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism, published by Duke University Press in 2000. She is also the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Her artwork is in many public and private collections including the Getty Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Yale University, New York Public Library, and the Harvard University Library. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art News, The Forward, The New York Times, Art Papers, and The Brooklyn Rail. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Bee is represented by Accola Griefen Gallery and A.I.R. Gallery in New York.

13

KEETRA DIXON left: “Throughout,” digital print, “24 x 36”, 2008 right: “The Great Delusion,” digital print, “24 x 36”, 2005

14

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY

I straddle a wide set of mediums in my playful and process-oriented work. With a foothold in graphic design, I often reach into speculative terrain including experiential work, installation, and sculpture. My projects are spurred on by the fallibility of communication and attempts to connect. Form is evolved through the exploitation of platform and medium shortcomings. By utilizing the flick between concise communication and confusion, I hope to provide surprising and mesmerizing moments in the discord between intention, action and interpretation.

Artist & designer Keetra Dean Dixon (b. 1977, Anchorage, AK) is a designer, artist and educator.

Dixon divides her time between public installations, exhibits, lecturing and commercial projects. She has been recognized on several fronts including a US presidential award, a place in the permanent design collection at the SFMOMA, and the honorable ranking of ADC Young Gun. She has been featured in numerous publications and exhibits, including feature articles in Etapes Magazine and commissioned works for the ‘09 U.S. Presidential Inauguration and the ‘12 Olympic games. Dixon has held solo exhibits at the Kessel Kramer Gallery: KKOutlet, shown at the Walker Art Center & the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. In 2013 Dixon will be a featured speaker at TYPO SF and partaking in INCONGRUOUS, a residency for brazen experimentation in design practices at the NYC Museum of Arts and Design.

Dixon currently lives in NYC. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the Minneapolis College of Art + Design in 1999 and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006.

15

JUSTIN QUINN left: “Short Words With Tower,” ink and graphite on paper, 48 x 34”, 2012 middle: “Idle Tower,” gesso and collage on maple, 11 x 8.5 x 1.75”, 2011 right:“Blind Side Tower,” gesso and collage on maple, 11 x 8.5 x 1.75”, 2011

16

Justin Quinn’s Non-­‐Text statement :

BIOGRAPHY

Aa a AR ab a b ARB abr a b r ARBA abra a b r a ARBAD abrac a b r a k abraca a b r a k a ABRAKA abracad a b r a k a d ABRAKAD abracada a b r a k a d a ABRAKADA abracadab a b r a k a d a b ABRAKADAB abracadabr a b r a k a d a b r ABRAKADABR ABRACADABa b r a k a d a b r a ABRAKADABRA

Justin Quinn received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Superior and his MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa. He also holds a MA in art history and a Center for the Book certificate from the University of Iowa. Quinn is Associate Professor of Art at St. Cloud State University where his printshop overlooks the upper Mississippi River.

ARTIST STATEMENT

E a E E ab E E E abr E E E E abra E E E E E abrac E E E E E E abraca E E E E E E E abracad E E E E E E E E abracada E E E E E E E E E abracadab E E E E E E E E E E abracadabra E E E E E E E E E E E abracadabra

Ea E E ab E E E abr E E E E abra EEEEE

abrac

EEEEEE

abraca

EEEEEEE EEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEE

abracad abracada abracadab abracadabr abracadabra

Quinn is represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Marina Cain in San Francisco, and Kit Schulte in Berlin. Recent shows include “The End of Language” at the University of Virginia, “Drawing Now 2—Staphorst” at Galerie Hein Elferink in the Netherlands, and “Deeper Wonders than the Waves,” a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Next year Quinn will have a solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery entitled “I Have Seen Myself for what I Am and It is Terrifying.”

17

BIOGRAPHY Jim Stevens is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Lawrence Technological University, College of Architecture and Design, where he is the founding and acting Director of makeLab, a digital fabrication and design studio. As director, Stevens oversees research, publication and industry-sponsored design projects. Additionally, Stevens conducts frequent makeLab workshops and lectures across the U.S., China and Europe. Prior to his appointment to the faculty at Lawrence Tech, Stevens was the founding principal of a North Carolina design firm and more recently a principal with Peterson, Eure and Associates, P.A. Stevens is a Licensed Architect in the State of Michigan, certified by the National Council of Architecture Registration Boards (NCARB) and is a professional member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He is the recipient of the AIA Henry Adams Medal for Excellence in the Study of Architecture and is currently a Coleman Foundation Fellow. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from North Carolina State University (M.arch.

2007) and a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree from The Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA 1994).

Stevens is originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, but currently lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan with his wife and two children.

Ryan Molloy is a freelance graphic designer, artist, educator, and inter-disciplinary designer. Prior to teaching at EMU, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s Design Division where he also received his MFA in Design. Molloy has a Bachelor of Architecture degree as well, and has worked as both an architect and a graphic designer.

Molloy’s awards for his design work include the prestigious Art Directors Club Young Guns Award. In 2006 he edited and published a small-run magazine entitled Redaction, which won the Best in Show award in the AIGA juried exhibition “Design Re:View 2007.”

In 2008 his video work was featured in the highly regarded international OneDotZero film festival.

Molloy’s solo exhibition “Counterfeit Escape Route” ran at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, and he co-organized the exhibition “Dimension and Typography: A Survey of Letterforms in Space and Time” in Chicago, Illinois in 2009. His work has also been exhibited at the Austin Museum of Digital Art in Austin, Texas, in the exhibition “I Love Bytes” at Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries in the U.K., and at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

18

ARTIST STATEMENT “writing wall” is a dialogue between architecture and typography, masonry and the written word.

Masonry doubles as letterform and the creation of a built environment becomes synonymous with syntax forming sentences, paragraphs, and narratives.

Bricks, blocks and tiles are generally the same dimensions, textures and colors. Conversely, letters, paragraphs and stories are rich in variations and can be fluidly remixed by the writer. “writing wall” seeks to challenge our assumptions of the physical environment and language.

A small computer numeric controlled (CNC) milling machine was created to fit into a traveling case—this devices carves the molds necessary to create each mass-customized letter. A “writer” can take the suitcase CNC to any site where foam molds can be cut on demand. Masonry units/letterforms are then cast, dried and stacked. The “written” work then is created as the author begins to form the built object pushing the conventions of typography and/or questioning architectonic function.

Jim Stevens ryan Molloy right: Sketch for “writing wall”, concrete, foam molds, made with 3 axis CNC machine in a suitcase, 7 x 9 x 6” wall, 2013 left: “La Robia,” 2009, which will not be in “Non-Text,” reads “Escape from the architectural ghetto.” It is the basis for “writing wall.”

19

lance winn top left: “Three Views of Nothing,” digital print, 24 x 48”, 2004 bottom left: “Flood,” paint on canvas, 48 x 60”, 2009 right: “Life on Mars,” laser cut plastic, 15 x 20 x 24”, 2008

20

ARTIST STATEMENT My work results from exploring the impact of physical process on an initial image or idea. While the final products of my investigations take a variety of forms, from drawing to installation to video and robotics, the work is held together by a consistency of action, often repetitive and physically uninspiring, that attempts to develop complex experience out of simple, somewhat absurd “laws” governing the development of specific pieces.

I am trying to create generative processes (like the tracing of a contour or the attempt to follow an edge using a tool with particular physical limitations) that, through shear duplication, begin to show what an event or idea looks like, rather than what it means.

The interference of a physical investigation on an intellectual construct causes the initial question to be overwhelmed and lost, turning what could be socially significant into visual pattern that rests between wavelengths or the reverberations of invisible forces, and baroque decoration. There is an

BIOGRAPHY underlying desire to be able to interpret the pattern of these generative actions; a hope that, through abstract form, some sense might be made of senseless, yet concrete events. But there is also an understanding that the attempt at understanding, in this case, will be more likely to produce an aesthetic object than an answer.

As my work moves between different methods of production and reproduction, I am trying to test both the possibilities and the limitations of our various modes of communication. I am trying to conceive of a more fluid interaction between the meaning created by our environment and the meaning we project onto the events in our lives. Using the language and ideas behind our methods of reproducing images and objects, I would like to explore the nature of communication, as it depends upon difference and separation, and the effects this may have on our perception, as the way we “see” is filtered through the conceptual boundaries we construct.

21

Lance Winn’s personal work has been included in a range of recent books including the books 3D Typography and Virilio Now. He has been nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award for painting, and his work was represented in an article on new forms of drawing that was published in Contemporary magazine. Winn’s work has been shown nationally and internationally and in 2007 was part of a fiveyear survey at the Freedman Gallery.

In collaboration with Simone Jones, Winn’s robotic projections have been shown most recently as a part of “Nuit Blanche” in Toronto, at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, and the Icebox in Philadelphia.

Their work was presented at the Electra Festival, in “Stop,” a two-part show of international artists in Montreal, at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, “Media City 11 International Festival of Experimental Film and Video Art” in Windsor, Ontario, and in “Machine Life” at the Davies Foundation and Samuel J. Zacks Galleries in York, Ontario. Their most recent collaboration “End of Empire” will be shown in the Montreal Biennial.

AMANDA KATZ not shown: ”Azimuth,” LED light boxes, aluminum, ceiling mounted, shadows of letterforms projected onto floor 6 x 10”, 2013 top right: “Penn Yan/Elegy,” which will not appear in “Non-Text,” steel , 16 x 8”, 2013

22

ARTIST STATEMENT Poems, by implication of their formal characteristics, have traditionally provided a metaphysical view of the world determined by causal relationships. I recognize the impulse to propel the “story” of a poem as an ending-dependent strategy for constructing meaning. My visual art practice provides a poetic form that resists this kind of historical motion, favoring a rawness of perception in which mind and body simultaneously encounter legible objects/ installations. The physical dimensions of my artworks supply the bounds for linguistic motion; although the objects I produce are necessarily static, the texts they are composed of have no clear sense of beginning or ending. The main function of the texts, being compiled from fragmentary phrases from my poetry practice, is to break down the desire to hold onto an image or sensation before encountering the next, exposing the accountability of both the writer and reader in the desire for narrative. I believe that

the physical form of the artwork can metaphorically bolster the way its language-content functions, creating a necessary bond between what is written and how those words become physical.

Currently I have become interested in creating site-responsive art that is dependent upon the engagement of both the viewer (as reader) and situational forces. I believe that site-oriented art is primarily a way of orchestrating both a perceptual and emotional condition within a certain location: a method for creating an idea space within an actual space. I am interested in how the public placement of non-functional and non-narrative texts can reveal a set of assumptions for not only how we read but also how we assign meaning to language encountered off the page.

23

BIOGRAPHY Amanda Katz is a sculptor and poet whose artwork centers on ideas and methods for the dimensional manifestation of poetry. Her practice engages the challenge of embodying how language functions, while investigating how the manipulation of materials can both alter the process of reading and reveal expectations for narrative.

Katz was born in New York City and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BA from Colgate University with honors in Art and Art History, and is currently completing her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has been featured at the Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Santa Monica Place as part of the Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival, Santa Monica, CA (2012); Copper Colored Mountain Arts, Ann Arbor, MI (2011), Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN (2011), Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2010), and I-Park, East Haddam, CT (2010). She is also the founder and director of Katz’s Deli, an artist-exchange and discussion space in Los Angeles.

BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Liese Zahabi is a graphic/interaction designer and Assistant Professor of Visual Communication at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. She received her Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Eastern Michigan University. She has been working as a designer for thirteen years.

Humans rely on patterns—of words, images, sounds, events—to make meaning and understand the world around them. The vast amount of content found on the Internet has helped to shape these patterns for over twenty years. However, this cascading stream of information obfuscates as much as it informs. Even a seemingly straightforward Google search has been curated and shaped by invisible forces. The patterns and complex algorithms used by the computer influence our own pattern-making and perceptions.

Zahabi’s academic research focuses on search as a cognitive and cultural process and artifact, and how the design of metaphoric interfaces can change the experience of search tasks. Her creative design work is also metaphorical, and explores how the nature of search manifests itself in visual patterns and sensemaking, and how language and image intersect within the context of the Internet.

24

This project explores the patterns distilled and displayed by Google, and how those patterns can be reconfigured in ways that alter our experience of online search. Using the raw materials of search results—visual screen grabs and textual headlines—and the context of “the news,” I have created experimental kaleidoscope-like visuals, and typographic studies that reveal relationships within and among the texts. When paired and displayed as a physical installation that transforms the pixel-focused world of the Internet into a tangible set of artifacts, viewers are invited to make new connections and juxtapositions that transcend the generic Google list.

LIESE ZAHABI left: “An Exqusite Morass,” wood, plastic, paper & digital media, variable dimensions, 2013

25

BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

J. Kyle Daevel is a Chicago-based designer and artist. He received his MFA in 3D design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008, and a BFA in graphic design from the University of Memphis in 2000. His studio focuses on experimental 2D and 3D Design. Daevel’s work has been featured in publications such as Azure, Icon, Interactions, and The 3D Type Book, and has recently shown in Memphis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

My methodological approach to design and art incorporates strong elements of storytelling— narratives explored range from the boundaries of public and private space to the attitude of a city or culture. These stories are told through various strategies such as a user’s physical interaction with an object, as well as through the visual qualities of the object. Form and narrative are one.

26

KYLE DAEVEL left: “Detroit Alphabet,” mixed media, seven letters, each letter 10” high, 2007, 2013

27

seth ellis right: “Meanwhile,” acrylic, light, 38 x 38 x 36”, 2012

28

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY

My work is about finding new ways to tell stories— by making them site-specific, by creating them with randomizing programs, by asking other people, living and dead, for input. I’m interested in active, experiential reading. One of the most ancient forms of active reading is divination, in which the way the reader manipulates the “text” alters the reading, and potentially shapes readers, or at least makes them go about their day a little differently. Divinatory tools are games the reader plays with the universe.

Seth Ellis is currently Assistant Professor in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, where he teaches narrative art and interface design. Before his current art practice, he worked as an interactivity designer for several years. His work has been shown in America, Europe, and several places in the Atlantic Ocean, at galleries, festivals and symposia. He enjoys encyclopedias and graph paper.

“Meanwhile” is a tile game, a physical interface of text fragments that readers can manipulate to produce different potential meanings.

29

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY

“Ironically Digital Typography” is a series of threedimensional compositions created by twisting computer punch cards into script-like letters spelling out infinity and other words and glyphs. The three-dimensional letters were designed to suggest the thick and thin strokes seen in Old Style fonts that are based upon the movement of a broad nibbed pen in calligraphic letters, as was thoroughly observed in Gerrit Noordzij’s book The Stroke. Adding another historical reference, I used computer punch cards as the material to which the letters refer. The punch cards operate monotype typesetters.

Todd Childers is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Bowling Green State University. In 2012, Childers presented at DesignInquiry’s DesignCity: Berlin workshop on the German modernist designer Anton Stankowski and the Berlin Layout graphic identity system. He also presented at Typo Berlin Shift in 2011, and on Three-Dimensional Typography at ATypI Word Dublin in 2010. Childers’ designs have been recognized for “Typographic Excellence in Lettering” in the Type Directors Club “TDC 58 Show” in New York, 2012, as a semifinalist in Adobe Achievement Awards Traditional Media for Faculty, 2012, at New Views 2 London, 2009, and at AIGA XCD Sharing Dreams 5, Havana, Cuba, 2008.

Childers’ work has also appeared in Steven Heller’s Letterforms: Bawdy, Bad and Beautiful, (2003), with an Honorable Mention in Publish Magazine & Garage Font’s Next Big Thing, 1998, in Graphis’ Digital Type 1997, and in the “ACD 100 Show,” 1995.

His education includes two graphic design degrees: MFA from CalArts, 1993, and a Bachelors Degree NC State University, 1986.

30

todd childers left: “Ironically Digital Type: Infinity,” cut paper, 7.5 x 7.5 x 7.5”, 2013

31

JOHN ADELMAN left: “Flank,” gel ink on paper, 30 x 30”, 2013 right: “Fardel,” black pigment ink on whiteboard, 24 x 24”, 2008

32

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY

My drawings affirm conceptual forethought and process as equal to the final product. They use gel ink pens and are a fulfillment of a formula.

This formula is instituted at the beginning, and is unaltered throughout the duration of a work and yields its own resolution. The drawings are an ode to the component. Each work uses a single resource, a collection of specific quantities, such as an unabridged dictionary. the drawing is realized when the component, through a variety of methods, is culled from the resource and coupled with a set of variables. This reveals an order and structure amongst the chaos, happenstance and improbability.

While a work is in progress, I attempt to remove the activities associated with aesthetic concerns.

Instead, I concern myself with the adherence to the original conceptual decisions. The text, derived from the 1979 Unabridged Encyclopedic Websterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dictionary, is handwritten, both the word and definition(s) until the formula is complete. The title is the word that directly follows that last word of the previous piece. The title wordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s definition is changed from the meaning ascribed it by the English language to a definition on how this particular work is performed.

John Adelman, a Houston, Texas based artist, was born in Norwalk, Ohio just west of Cleveland, in 1969. Adelman graduated with a BFA in drawing, painting, and printmaking in 1992 from The Ohio State University in Columbus, and there had his first solo exhibition. Following a decade-long tenure with a screen printing firm, Adelman earned his MFA in drawing and painting from University of North Texas in Denton in 2006. He is currently represented

by Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, Texas, Darke Gallery in Houston, Texas, Diane Rosenstein Fine Art in Los Angeles, California and Galerie Mutlu in Istanbul, Turkey. Adelman has had over twenty solo exhibitions including shows in Brno, Czech Republic, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Galveston, Texas and has been a part in over 180 group shows throughout the world. In addition to being an artist, Adelman is also an Adjunct Professor of Drawing and Art History at Lone Star College - Montgomery and Houston Community College.

33

christopher baker right: “It’s Been a While Since I Last Wrote,” luminescent kinetic sculpture motion graphic http://christopherbaker.net/projects/itsbeenawhile to see piece in motion, 2008

34

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY

My work examines the complex relationship between society and its technologies. Originally trained as a scientist, my artistic practice represents an uneasy balance of eager technological optimism, analytical processes, deep-rooted skepticism and intuitive engagement. As technologists make daily promises to improve our lives by uniting our physical and digital worlds, I attempt to make work that reflects upon the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles. With these interests at heart, my large-scale video projections, participatory practices and multi-media installations often fuse existing physical spaces with our disembodied, yet poetic, digital ephemera, resulting in revelatory and sometimes disorienting forms.

Christopher Baker is an artist whose work engages the rich collection of social, technological and ideological networks present in the urban landscape.

He creates artifacts and situations that reveal and generate relationships within and between these networks. His work has been presented in festivals, galleries and museums internationally including Pace Gallery and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York; the Saatchi Gallery in London; Laboral in Gijon, Spain; Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina in Florence, Italy and Alta Technologia Andina in Lima, Peru. Bakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work has been published and reviewed widely, recently appearing in Sculpture magazine, and the critically acclaimed Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design series. Since completing a Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Media Arts at the University of Minnesota, Baker has held visiting artist positions at Kitchen Budapest, an experimental media lab in Hungary, and Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art and Technology Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

35

UNIVERSITY GALLERY, EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 30

– DECEMBER 11, 2013

TARBLE ARTS CENTER, EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, JANUARY 11 – ­ FEBRUARY 23, 2014

CATALOGUE DESIGNED BY ERIKA MACKLEY, CATALOGUE PRINTED BY WHITE PINE PRINTERS, ANN ARBOR, MI, JUNE 2013 PRINTED ON 100# COUGAR NATURAL SMOOTH COVER AND 80# COUGAR NATURAL SMOOTH TEXT, FONTS: DINPRO, LOT