EXHIBITION: [text]
December
12-23, 2007
Opening Reception:
Thursday December 13, 7- 10pm
(As part of Propeller’s “Curated Exhibition” series, the 2007 show will be will have noted Canadian cultural critic, journalist, and poet Gary Michael Dault as curator.)
Featuring
works by:
Gail Bourgeois
Laura Calvi
Katie Kehoe
Susan Kordalewski
Mathieu Lefevre
Kris Lindskoog
Adam Matak
Kurt Mueller
Les Newman
Paul Roorda
David Saunders
Andrea Vander Kooij
The use of words as a core for the creation of works of visual art can now
claim a century of history, and arguably occupies centre stage in current
cultural discourse via an organic relationship to the World Wide Web,
and the algorithms of digital programming.
From Constructivism and dada, to fluxus, conceptualism and net.art, not
to mention the agitprop of global marketing and its culture-jamming adversaries,
works of art produced at the cutting edge have fixed upon the Word: as
text, structure, constraint, syntactical word-play, object, or meme. It
is a fixation as various as the uses of language itself, and is marked
by the intrinsic democracy of words. The products of this activity range
from the narrative to the analytical to pure poetry, which is both and
neither.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said “The limits of my language are the limits
of my world,” and linguistic theory has suggested that the Mind
and Language are one. We use language as a bridge and as a bomb; words
are ciphers, gestures and commodities. Their power is their flexibility:
they can illuminate or disguise, enrich or debase.
Propeller Center for the Visual Arts is seeking works of art that are
made of words: the word as tool, as structural unit, as expressive dynamo.