Between Your Hand and My Head

Description:

Between Your Hand and My Head was a group exhibition that explored artistic representations of handwritten text. While it negotiates the communicative, transformative, semiotic, and social functions of the written word, handwritten text is as much an expressive and meandering marker of identity and subjectivity as it is a device of strict formal and aesthetic convention. Attuned to the shifting indeterminacies between private conception and public interpretation, works in this exhibition by John Baldessari, Joseph Grigely, Salar Mameni, and Dave Muller navigated the multiple roles of handwritten text, finding overlaps between strategies of design and information, expression and conceptual investigation.

Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971) was originally realized by students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a handwritten wall text performed in the artist’s absence. Exhibited here as a lithograph, this version of Baldessari’s seminal injunction complicates notions of authorship and authenticity, further questioning the primacy of the original performance with its reproduction through print.

Deaf since the age of ten, much of Grigely’s practice makes use of written notes passed to him during the course of everyday conversation. Produced in collaboration with artist Amy Vogel, You (2001) is comprised of enlarged notes of handwritten names along with an audio installation.

Mameni’s video Credits (2004) reanimated the scrolling mechanics and end text of the Hollywood movie Babe: Pig in the City (1998) through the idiosyncratic inflections of their hand-rendered illustration.

In contrast to his own admittedly difficult handwriting, Muller’s meticulous drawings This Is A Rise and Fall (Small) (2005) appropriated musicologist Reebee Garofalo’s 1977 chart mapping the genealogy of pop/rock music as a speculative portrait, an index of popular music (and perhaps of Muller himself), and its rabid interests in the consumption of music history.

An exhibition opening took place Dec 1, 2006.

Curated by Mark Soo.