Elision
Sara Blaylock, Karen Gallagher, Lilly Handley,
Charlene Tan, Cassie Thornton
Curated by Sara Blaylock
January 20 - February 19, 2007
Elision is a group exhibition about the intricate nature of visual, verbal, and written communication and its relationship to the viewer's own preconceptions of how information is exchanged. In the process, certain information is passed along as intended, but inevitably some of it is lost in the gaps and limitations of each medium. Elision presents artwork that considers a few places where a loss in communicative translation may occur and seeks to expose and highlight those failures. A selection of works in painting, video, sculpture, printmaking and architectural modeling are offered as vehicles into the gaps of communicative efficacy.
Sara Blaylock's video work highlights the most basic tenants of interpersonal communication through deletion or emphasis of particular elements. Subtext considers how language and context affect our perceptions of communication, while Man and Woman Meet in Secret uses non-specific visual language to narrate a familiar story. View some of Sara's videos on YouTube.
In a series of paintings, Lilly Handley appropriates images from the news media and places them side-by-side to create a field of simultaneous contemporary events that always exist as yesterday's news and reaffirm the transience of information exchange.
Karen Gallagher seeks to highlight the mistakes made in handwritten language by creating a typeset based upon the average of mis-made letters in her own writing. The resulting prints made off this new font (often in the form of business letters) maintain a recognizable format,but eliminate nearly all readable material.
Charlene Tan's installation The Silent Strength of an Everyday Innuendo utilizes business cards and binoculars in a manner that lets one confront socially unacceptable subjects and languages and their place in public discourse through a private peepshow point of view
Cassie Thornton builds small continuously evolving, ever-moving, site specific constructions that elaborate on how regional architecture acts as communicator of local social structures and socioeconomic conditions.
