Print Text Language

The artist's book is variously defined. It can range from casual and diaristic to meticulously editioned, from intimate to intended for mass consumption, and from works on paper to works that are most aptly described as sculptural. This exhibition presents the many ways in which artists  engage with print, text, and language. It examines the archive, the series, and narrative, as well as these artists' relationships to language and letters as forms and symbols.

The exhibition offers a rethinking of the book in contemporary art practices. The premise of the exhibition is largely to reexamine artists' books as conceptual projects where structure is the lesser identifier and unusual formats are emphasized. It is precisely because these artistic forms resist singular definitions that artists so persistently manipulate them, employing both traditional and digital media to create iterations and ideas about books. The work on display features abundant interpretations of form and introduces several generations of former B.F.A. and M.F.A. graduates and their artistic practices. This exhibition includes works, among others, by Mel Bochner, Emilie Clark (B.F.A. '91), Moyra Davey, Simryn Gill, Jill Magid (B.F.A. '93), Lucy Skaer, and past Teiger mentors Shannon Ebner and Josiah McElheny, and current Teiger mentor Alejandro Cesarco. The exhibition is curated by Associate Professor Elisabeth Meyer, art.