Exploring how we use language is "a knot worth unravelling,” says "Off the Page" curator Stella Witcher. Credit: Tyler Hickman
"Off the Page: Language as Material” is on display through Nov. 1. Credit: Tyler Hickman
Western Slope artists Samuel Austin explores the mythology of the American West through wildfire, wildlife, tourism and rural life. Credit: Tyler Hickman
Boulder artist Lisa Berley turned to writing notes on her iPhone after the 2018 death of her son. Courtesy: Dairy Arts Center
The more time Samuel Austin spent with the other artists in “Off the Page: Language as Material,” the more the exhibition changed the way he thought about his own work.
Austin has returned to the Dairy Arts Center several times since the group exhibition opened on Aug. 14, looking more closely at what the other creatives were doing with words. Afterward, he found himself reconsidering how much creative expression depends on prose.
“Language really influences what we think about and how we think about it,” Austin says. “With movies, we think about lines that are spoken, the same with plays. Music is largely lyrics. I hadn’t thought about that much, but the concept of language is universally important.”
That realization gets at the central question behind “Off the Page,” on view through Nov. 1. Bringing together 13 contemporary artists working across photography, sculpture, installation, mixed media and painting, the exhibition considers language as more than something to read.
The exhibition was curated by Stella Witcher, who served as the Dairy’s visual arts curator through August. In her curatorial statement, Witcher describes the show as a “cultural litmus test” for the role words and language play in contemporary creative thinking.
“Language is so embedded in our daily lives that it can be easy to overlook its extraordinary power,” she says. “But the words available to us, and how we receive them, are more influential and contested than ever before, a knot worth unravelling, even if just in fragments.”
For Boulder artist Lisa Berley, language entered her artistic practice after a devastating loss.
Berley’s installation occupies a large wall behind the Dairy’s box office. Four large-format mountain drawings create a landscape across the space, overlaid with 19 framed poems. The mountain imagery contains dark forms representing wind moving through Sunshine Canyon. It connects to the 2018 accident that killed Berley’s younger son.
“I couldn't physically go to the studio because of the grief,” Berley says. “So I was lying on the couch a lot with my iPhone, and I went into my notes and just started writing.”
Berley eventually encountered erasure poetry, which creates new work by obscuring portions of existing texts and leaving selected words behind. She began using articles to find language that spoke to her mourning.
“The thing about grief is it's fragmented. It’s a nonlinear thing,” Berley says. “I look for words that I relate to, and then I go in and redact words and make the poems about the loss of my son. The process I'm going through is also reinventing myself, because it's about what to do with the years that come after tragedy.”
Austin approaches storytelling through a different landscape.
The artist grew up in Western Colorado and has been developing a body of work about an American West that looks different from familiar mythology centered on frontier legends. His subjects instead include wildfire, wildlife, tourism and rural life.
“I’m really trying to chronicle stories that I know personally,” he says. “That way people who haven’t lived in rural Colorado and might not think about water in the same way can better understand its role through my work.”
Writing has long accompanied that process. Austin uses a restored 1936 typewriter to write about painting and creativity and sometimes incorporates words directly into his paintings.
"Language has always been a natural gravitation for me,” Austin says. “I’ve kept journals for a long time about paint and the process of creativity, and I write on a lot of my paintings.”
Berley and Austin represent only two of the exhibition’s approaches.
Bug, Mariel Reed, Dagny Rayn Chika, Josh Hughes, Nathan Storey Freeman, Jacqueline Moulton, Dawn Siebel and Leona Lazar are represented in the McMahon Gallery. Sarah Tenney’s cutout works occupy the Polly Addison Gallery, Austin Baskett’s work fills the Caruso Gallery and Moulton’s contribution extends outside onto the mural wall.
Together, the artists explore language through memory, identity, ancestry, archives and storytelling. Witcher argues those questions take on additional weight amid a flood of political rhetoric, advertising, social media, news and artificially generated language.
“When words can be generated almost instantaneously, what does it mean to write from lived, embodied human experience?” Witcher says. “These technological shifts make examining our relationship to language all the more critical.”
The Dairy is extending those questions through public programming. “Word/Play!,” an open mic, takes place Oct. 7 at 5 p.m., followed by the “Writing Through Art” workshop Oct. 13 at 5 p.m. “First Draft to Bookshelf: The Making of a Novel” will feature author Wallis Kinney on Oct. 20 at 5 p.m.
The programs extend the exhibition’s exploration of language beyond the artwork itself. According to Austin, that same exchange of ideas among artists has been one of the show’s most lasting effects.
“It’s just so interesting to see how different people approach language and how it influences their creativity,” Austin says. “The other artists’ work did affect me — just seeing how we all come around things and all the ways that people incorporate words into their art was really moving.”
ON VIEW: Off the Page: Language as Material. Through Nov. 1, Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. Free
ON VIEW: “Off the Page: Language as Material” is on display through Nov. 1 at the Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. Free
