Michael Workman

Theories abound on how human brains process language. It's amazing that you can look at a piece of paper and read someone else's thoughts on it, especially considering the number of different languages. Any sense of belonging that a language confers is a tenuous connection--witness the huge segment of the U.S. population that still can't take part in the miracle of reading. But even for those of us blessed with that ability, travelling to a non-English-speaking country can bring home the disconcerting limits of our ability to communicate. Meeting those limits can rupture the contentment we take for granted in familiar surroundings.

"Texts," at the 1/Quarterly Space in the Wicker Park neighborhood, is about illiteracy as a gap in recognition. Since graduating from the Art Institute three years ago, Amy Lemaire has developed this idea of using text-based imagery to investigate illiteracy. Lemaire traveled to Iceland and Japan, collecting snippets of text from newspapers and magazines, photographing billboards, street signs, advertisements and graffiti, keeping voluminous sketches and writings on the typography of the cities in three notebooks. One includes material from Iceland, and the two others, Japan and Chicago. The Chicago material she collected from excursions to Chinatown North, near Argyle Street, and Chinatown South, near Wentworth Street.

"Amy's work uses reconstituted typography to get at the identity of a place," explains Eric Ravenstein, who curates the exhibit with 1/Quarterly directors Heather Mekkelson and Deanna Hovy. "Just as Chicago is characterized by certain styles of typography or graffiti, so are these other cities around the world that Lemaire did her research in." Lemaire takes that characterization to its ultimate conclusion in her work, describing the texts as her way of imagining the individuality of a city.

Carefully juxtaposing the type to emphasize the shapes of the letters, she cropped the characters together in collages, choosing the finished pieces for their success at evoking a sense of place. From the finished collages she painted a series of canvases, hemming in the typographical elements using borders, frames and selective cropping techniques. The letter-character R, for instance, can easily be misread as a B or P. Many of the texts are trimmed to their mid-sections, making the strings of characters and the words they form impossible to read. The finished works resemble myopic explosions of whirls, squiggles, kinky lines, iconic color blocks and universal symbols, such as arrows.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would have characterized Lemaire's attempt at imagining the meaning of language in this way as attempting to imagine a form of life. And, as she describes it, that's pretty close to the function of Lemaire's finished paintings: "When I traveled to Japan, I was in this different place where I couldn't read any of the language." "Texts" reflects the sense of invisibility one feels when unable to fully take part in a foreign culture. Only through imagination, Lemaire suggests, can you feel grounded in a place you've never lived. The initial encounter, however, as with her paintings, still alienates. "I was looking at all these texts and couldn't get any information from them beyond a basic kind of graphical recognition. That inability to comprehend what I was looking at effectively made me feel illiterate."

Greener grass

Anybody who's ever seen "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verril" segment of the 1982 film "Creepshow," in which Verrill, played by Stephen King, is slowly infected with and devoured by a world-conquering alien vegetation, will understand the appeal of this exhibit.

Chicago-based artist Joshua Rosenstock plants an installation in the backyard of the 1926 Exhibition Studies Space. Titled "Revenge of the Lawn," the "durational installation" is a living-room scene comprised of "found furniture reupholstered with dirt and seeds." The lawn slowly overgrows the furniture, and the results are broadcast online at www.revengeofthelawn.com via time-lapse video footage "as it sprouts, grows, and ultimately withers and dies over the course of the summer." A time-lapse of the "lawn furniture's" evolution will be shown at the reception for the installation.

"Texts" shows at 1/Quarterly Space, 1355 North Milwaukee, (773)252-7780, through September 27. "Revenge of the Lawn" shows at 1926 Exhibition Studies Space, 1926 North Halsted, (773)665-4802.

(2003-08-27)

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