Kay Rosen: New Works On Paper
Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX
February 21 – April 25, 2020
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works on paper by Kay Rosen—the artist’s second presentation at the gallery.
Rosen makes paintings of ordinary words and phrases, but the ways she structures her compositions—and their resulting implications—are anything but expected. She uses a host of devices to encourage us to look at language with fresh eyes—stacking, omitting, repeating, rotating, or reordering letters; alternating colors, upper and lower case, type size, boldness, or italics—calling attention to rhythms and patterns, words within words, and dramas inside letterforms, all of which hide in plain sight during normal reading, writing, and speech. She selects the words and phrases she does for their “potential to represent things in an alternate way [that makes] reading an active, visual, deciphering process rather than a passive, cognitive, scanning [one].”
The works in this show point to a range of ideas/events/phenomena/people: a landmark US Supreme Court decision from 1954, feminism, Shakespeare, self-portraiture, police brutality, caroling. Four pieces (Brown v., Rogue Rouge, Black and Blue, and I Love Yellow) might be thought of as a mini-series built around the suggestive potential of color. The broad range of stories Rosen’s artworks tell all originate with her preternatural sensitivity to language and typography. Not only do they have the potential to help us, her viewers, rediscover the pleasure and power and elasticity of language, but also the richness and interconnectivity that might be found in all of the mundane.
For more information on Kay Rosen: New Works On Paper at Lora Reynolds Gallery, click here.