Congratulations to Kay Rosen on the opening of her Stirring Wirds exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
“In the past, I have gone where the language has led me, but in these times, out of priorities, anger, and urgency, I have made artworks whose texts pertain in some way only to the current political situation,” Kay Rosen has said… In the end, Rosen has created an exhibition about the resilience of individual communities and the country as a whole. (ARTNEWS)
News
Kay Rosen interview at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
A Traveling Show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston closed last week. The exhibition highlighted the mail art collaboration of Kay Rosen and Matt Keegan, and featured Rosen's bronze canvas edition, Y. A December conversation between the artists and curator Dean Daderko can be viewed here.
Kay Rosen at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston
A Traveling Show opens next week at CAMH, featuring the work of Kay Rosen. The exhibition will include Y, a painted bronze edition produced by Beyer Projects in 2014.
A Traveling Show is an exploration of language, linguistics, and personal communication. At its heart is a selection of mail art exchanged over the past eight years by artists Matt Keegan and Kay Rosen. Their correspondence is augmented by a selection of artworks that includes wall paintings, sculptures, and drawings that demonstrate the artists’ unique and individual approaches to language. (source: CAMH website)
Kay Rosen at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Kay Rosen's exhibition, Map of the World, is underway at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. The exhibition includes two large scale wall pieces.
The Gallery’s entrance court is its most public space, traversed by hundreds of viewers every day. But whose space is it? Is it ours or is it yours? In her wall-to-wall project for the entrance court, American artist Kay Rosen conjures with these big questions of possession, occupation and cultural territory.
Rosen has emblazoned one side of the entrance court with YOURS OURS, a vast word painting in which two pronouns – ‘yours’ and ‘ours’ – struggle unequally for ownership of the available wall space...
...Part puzzle, part proclamation, and part concrete poem, Rosen’s project is the latest addition to the Gallery’s long-running series of contemporary projects. Rosen is also represented in the Gallery’ collection by the recently acquired wall painting BLURRED. (click for full description)
Kay Rosen: LOL
Dear Chicago, Kay Rosen is back! Don't miss LOL, on view through January 3, 2015 at Monique Meloche Gallery. The work follows Rosen's memorable Go Do Good, 2011, a six-story text mural on the north wall of 17 North State Street.
Introducing Y, a new edition by Kay Rosen
Beyer Projects is pleased to announce the release of our second collaboration with Kay Rosen. Y is a painted cast bronze canvas published in an edition of 6.
The edition's release coincides with Kay Rosen: Blingo, a solo exhibition opening May 16, 2014 at Sikkema Jenkins Co. in New York.
Kay Rosen: Sweet Jesus
Beyer Projects is pleased to announce Sweet Jesus by Kay Rosen. The work is currently included in the exhibition Kay Rosen: Wide and Deep at Sikkema & Jenkins Co., New York.
The artist’s first project with us is a wall-mounted light box produced in edition of 6. This intimate work is connected to a 2011 series of drawings of phrases depicted as overlapping letters, which were made according to a pair of predetermined constraints: each phrase must begin and end with the same letter, and must bear a formal or stylistic correlation to its meaning. This visual symmetry is thrown into sharp relief by the brilliantly backlit, overlain letters of Sweet Jesus, which can be seen all at once, as a bright abstraction, or identified individually. As a three-dimensional object, the work dramatizes what has been an implicit theme of Rosen’s art of the past four decades: the idea that words, far from being neutral instruments of communication, can possess an obdurate physicality and their own tangible, even sculptural, qualities. In her presentation of the title phrase as translucent, Rosen demonstrates—seemingly paradoxically—how language can resist the transparency often ascribed to it.
Indeed, Rosen’s work in a variety of mediums (painting, drawing, editions, and installations) has cleverly shown how words’ physical qualities—typeface, color, spacing, scale, positioning—can alter legibility and, in turn, affect meaning. She favors those instances of language that foreground linguistic materiality and confound the processes of seeing and reading, such as misspellings, homonyms, homophones, rhymes, puns, palindromes, and double-entendres. This use of word as image, and the rule-based methods according to which this work was created, aligns Rosen with a text-based Conceptualist heritage that includes Lawrence Weiner and Ed Ruscha, but other ties are also evident. Her chosen words and phrases, like those of her contemporary Jenny Holzer, often have pointed political implications, while on a purely formal register, the stacked letterforms of Sweet Jesus call up Jasper Johns’s overlapping numbers and alphabets. And if the work’s means and devotional size evoke yet another tradition—a history of religious art that encompasses illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows—the link is hardly unequivocal. “Sweet Jesus” is, after all, often used as an expression of surprise or stupefaction.