September 3 to December 7, 2013
Drawn to Language features five artists whose artwork captures the interaction of visual art and language.
The exhibition is a series of dynamic installations that variously highlight painting, photography, text, and performance. Each artist incorporates words according to a highly personal artistic vision. The artists are Susan Silton, Alexandra Grant, Holly Downing with poet David St. John, Kate Ingold, and Demian Flores in conjunction with singer Lila Downs and a larger group of Mexican contemporary artists.
As Fisher Curator Ariadni Liokatis says, “the artists in Drawn to Language are all attracted to words, but in entirely different ways.” Selma Holo, Director of the Fisher Museum believes that the exhibition is “especially compelling for its allusions and mingling of religion, class matters, psychoanalysis, feminism and literature”. And, she adds, “that even as Drawn to Language is an intellectually challenging exhibition, it is also stunningly and sensuously beautiful, and in some of the galleries participatory and performative as well”.
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Drawn to Language continues a long tradition at the Fisher Museum of featuring work honoring the written word in conjunction with a visual art vision. A few such exhibitions were Michael Mazur and Robert Pinsky’s The Inferno of Dante; Buzz Spector’s Bibliography, Ofri Cnaani’s Sota Project; and Enrique Chagoya’s inspiration art that was born of comic books and super heroes from the United States and Mexico. Blacklist, the Jenny Holzer designed memorial garden and a pre-eminent piece of Los Angeles public art is permanently installed in front of the Fisher Museum along Exposition Blvd. These, and now Drawn to Language, represent Fisher’s enduring commitment to language and art and the influence they have on each other.
Join artist Susan Silton in a collective retyping of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Sign up here.