ADRIENNE GAITHER, Mocada, Brooklyn, until April 10, 2016.
4th, 2015.
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way- things I had no words for.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
My work focuses on an ordinary subject that we interact with every day, text. As a designer, I have always been interested in the way viewers interpret and extrapolate information conveyed through text. Using the alphabet as a medium, I’ve dissected the common structures of letters A-Z to combine form and content as image. My motivation and objective is to use the shapes found in the alphabet as forms rather than building blocks of words, freeing myself from the confines of legibility required in graphic design and meaning assigned to language. Offering in turn, a visual experience of information that goes beyond text and readability.
Practicing between traditional (painting, mixed media) and digital (graphic design) methods of art making, my work bridges the gap between the past, present, and future to transform familiar imagery and abstract forms into systematic imaginative compositions. Thematically, I attempt to highlight the struggle between what we believe we see, what we want to see, and what is actually there to be seen. Detached from the duties of communication and meaning, I use the material qualities of language with color to acknowledge, explore, narrate and express my experiences and the world around me.
Being someone that relies heavily on technology to disseminate information, I am obsessed with the ways in which perception, information, and expression have in some way been flattened by the world of technology. My conceptual and systematic framework style are exploited as a means to an end; for me, clarity and balance are found solely though the process itself. What remains is a new and deconstructed idea of communication. The conclusion, if any, is left to the viewer’s discretion.
Memoirs of Permanence: A WINNING HAND
2nd, 2015.
You cannot choose your family, therefore metaphorically speaking, you cannot change the hand you were dealt. Memoirs of Permanence: Winning Hand is a visual recognition of that universal fact. Biological family is not chosen, it is dealt. Meaning the culture and circumstances you were born into, that shapes you as an adult, is completely beyond our control. Blessing or curse makes no different, paralleling the construct of familial ties, you do the best with what you are given.
3rd, 2015.
Predecessors, 2015.
In this series, I conceptualize my winning hand, with the visual memories of my relatives. Merging traditional techniques of painting with digital manipulations, bridges the subject’s likeness into imaginative compositions; “playing cards.” Transforming each subject into a rank, and suit, creates a different representation of familial prominence and influence. (text artist)