Textology

NCECA 2022: Fertile Ground: Concurrent Exhibitions: Sacramento, CA

Group Exhibit Curated/Organized by Stephanie Lanter and selected by NCECA: upcoming in March 2022

Textology poster for dossier sm.jpg

 Artworks I curated and submitted in my proposal of the group show Textology, for NCECA 2022

Artists from top left: Stephanie Lanter, Xia Zhang, Emily O’Keefe-Connell, Dawn Holder, Malcolm Motubu Smith, Mimi Joung, Nicole Seisler, Thomas Muller, Kwan Jeong

Proposal Summary

 “Textology presents the sculptural potential of written language through varied ceramic approaches. Implicitly and explicitly, artists from around the world mine richly layered meanings from our ubiquitous terrain of text.”  

Exhibition Concept (As it relates to Conference theme: Fertile Ground)

 Dimensionless, disembodied words on screens construct realities. Never before today has this circumstance been more globally understood. By embodying language physically, artists can invert this relationship. Through Textology, or the study of the production of texts, the ceramic makers included in this exhibit proposal interpret, manipulate and re-integrate words and writing as fertile ground for renewed understandings of the self, culture and environment. We examine what is real. As objects that document change, power, poetry and the body, our sculptural words reflect the ever-evolving potentialities of text to connect, transform, destroy and heal. 

Since the earliest recorded writing on Cuneiform slabs, the relationship of clay and language has proved fundamental in lively, varied, and revelatory ways. These two mediums dovetail in balancing the virtual/ephemeral with the corporeal/material. Words are vessels. Language is a landscape. These artists unfix each from convention through innovative processes and approaches. They make text tangible. Individual, political and historic internalizations and applications of texts have the plasticity and elasticity of clay. The malleability of meaning is mimicked in the slumping of overfired porcelain, the layering of slip letters to the point of obscured legibility, graffiti in relief, the etching of fragmented idioms, the opaque skin of thick glaze. Text is a noun, verb and adjective. By making written language no longer merely literal, we invite in the senses. We invite new impressions, openings and questions.

Dominant narratives provide structure for communities, but also oppression and division, as seen daily in our lives and on the news. Text is planted into and growing from the epistemological ground on which we walk – it is inescapable. Bibles, comic books, dictionaries, diaries, emogi catalogs, novels, history tomes, DM lists, film, social media, tunnel walls, signage, and monuments are just some of the ripe fields from which we harvest our work. By decontextualizing and objectifying phrases, symbols and statements in new forms we simultaneously subvert and honor. We challenge and change the message rather than attack the messenger. 

Ambiguous and critical, this grouping of projects not only expresses nonverbal experience through text, it addresses the nature and mechanisms of text itself. Though lived perceptions and technologies shift and shape communication -- as semioticians explain -- the human need for it is visceral and primary. Whether depicting written language as a barrier to comprehension, vehicle for improvisation, or function of nature subject to growth, time, decay and death, we investigate words as mappings. They are navigation points, topographies, boundaries, lines drawn and crossed. What is a word? How does it land? What does it mean to understand?

 Curator’s Statement

Textology artists are motivated by interpersonal disconnection, desire for social justice, issues of cross-cultural identity, and the poetics of the body­­. In varied ways for each, ceramic materials and processes are integral to content. Stephanie Lanter’s “slippery” homonyms and symbols sculpturally emerge from our magical, dysfunctional, and shifting modes of virtual communication. Layered like language, they are manually slip-trailed constructions, coil-built outlines, and reassembled fragments. Dawn Holder’s photographic and tile works subvert the authority of monuments in the American South. Using an online cut-up generator, she mangles and remixes Confederate inscriptions to revoke white supremacist rhetoric. Her non-narratives are etched into porcelain to become new speculations on history. Emily O’Keefe Connell also examines power systems by entombing bibles, encyclopedias, and dictionaries in slip and burning them out through firing. She reactivates the resulting ashy reliquary shells by cutting them open to reveal mysterious, delicate and organic cross sections. They are incantations that murder and memorialize these tomes. Kwan Jeong’s furniture pieces are branded with illegible, dripping glaze “labels,” encapsulating home and identity as she reconciles traditional Korean pottery values with new, ambiguous functionalities. Malcolm Motubu Smith intersects graffiti, comic books conventions, and African motifs on wheel-thrown and improvised vessels, “tagging” each piece with his prominently carved signature. This self-affirming hip-hop practice prioritizes pride in naming. Mimi Joung’s lacy vessels and sculptures are constructed of porcelain-traced words taken directly from the dystopian novel In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. Using appropriation and fictional story as building blocks reflects the surreal experience of cultural displacement. Nicole Seisler’s conceptual, haptic and practice-based works track, trace and imprint time, thought, and action. Her explorations are direct as a diary and ephemeral as metaphor. Thomas Müller’s poetic groupings of contradicting but related words embody the elusiveness of meaning. Like the liminal spaces in language that collapse into themselves, his cast, slumped letters both transcend and depend on their materiality. The mixed-media installation of Xia Zhang uses clay to frame screenshots from The World of Suzie Wong (1960). Racist, sexist quotes are embroidered in gold across these images, unapologetically presenting the film’s toxic white assimilationist narrative.

- Stephanie Lanter

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