“Regard a mighty tree, and you will discern that it is none other than an upright river pouring into the air of the sky.”

— Paul Valéry, “Poems in the Rough”

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. Throughout the history of arts and letters, the flux of image and language coalesced in various movements, from the visual poetics termed “calligrammes” by the French Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire to the concrete textuality of the Noigandres movement in Brazil. This exhibition departs from the Surrealist practice of the poème-objet, the dream-based assemblages constructed from scraps of text and found objects by André Breton between 1924 and the 1940s and picked up by modernist poets and artists of the neo-concrete movement including Ferreira Gullar, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica.

By bringing poetry into contact with materiality and relational aesthetics, Word Pictures and Poem Objects asks how these modernist poetics might be reimagined today — to plunge into the space of a poem, uncover beauty and contradiction in the ligatures, serifs, and graphic strokes of typographic design, find revelation in mundane constructions of paper and ink, or encode mysteries within the compositional space of a drawing, a sculpture, or an artist book.

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. The exhibition includes Angelica Bergamini, Evan Brownstein, Alice Combs, Ryan Erickson, Michele Foyer, Michel Gérard, Matt Goldberg, Kelly Hartigan Goldstein, Jeff B. Johnston, Hadar P. Kleiman, Carol Ladewig, Carolina Magis Weinberg, Peter Malone, Farhad Nikfam, Dana Pierfelice, Kathy Sirico, Lorna Stevens, Norah Stone, Ileana Tejada, Marina Tëmkina, and Lanny Weingrod. The works of each engage the blurred line(s) between mediums to revelatory ends, taking the form of visual poems, fragments of text, adjusted business cards, punctuation and typographic symbols, diaristic entries and song lyrics, sky writing, sculptural assemblages composed of ceramic and resin, invitation cards and newspaper clippings, as well as narrative forms including artist books and video performance. Together, they compose a lyric and fragmentary statement on the place of language within an increasingly visual world and the various forms of articulation, expression, and disclosure which structure the material and psychic conditions of our shared world.

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