"Text Messages" Invitational Exhibition

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 7, 6-8pm

Lanoue Gallery’s opening fall exhibition, Text Messages, invites its participating artists to

showcase work that use words or phrases as a significant aesthetic component.

While conceptual artists of the 1960s often used words to emphasize ideas over visual

forms, this contemporary group of artists puts words and materials on more equal

footing. The exhibit contains a wide range of both tactile and dazzling physical

materials - from hand-carved and stained wood, to layered sheets of printed plexiglass,

to laser cut metal with LEDs, to imagery carefully composed from thousands of paint

chips, or found and printed images from Instagram. And, yet, no matter the materials

employed, each work’s meaning is either subtly or radically transformed through the

addition of language.

Text-based artwork requires engaged, not passive viewers who bring a sense of

curiosity and personal experience to the interpretation of each work. Like the

now pervasive use of sending short bursts of words to one another through

mobile devices, the artworks in Text Messages primarily rely on visually “bitesize”

but carefully chosen words to both efficiently and impactfully communicate

ideas, thoughts, or emotions to its receiver. Each work assumes a kind of

communication shorthand with the viewer based on a perceived common

experience shared through our hyper-connected lives on a variety of social

media platforms. A gallery art exhibition of these physical objects, however,

allows the sharing of these “text messages” to happen among its viewers in a

shared physical space, potentially sparking real-time, face-to-face

conversations.