Regina Rex presents texture.txt a group exhibition featuring paintings, drawings, installation, and sculptures from artists Sarah Butler, Josh Faught, David Humphrey, Kristen Kee, Mary Reid Kelley, Lucy Kim, Leeza Meksin, Dona Nelson, Gilbert Rocha, Rebecca Shore and Jackie Tileston.

Immediately following the opening at 10pm, there will be a performance by Mira Stroika at Tandem Bar, 236 Troutman Street New York, NY 11237.

Texture is the arrangement, pattern, or feel of constituent parts: a rough surface comprised of granules, thread woven into fabric, musical notes swirling in densities of sounds. Text is letters shuffled into words shuffled into meaningful passages – visual communication representing speech, our guttural utterances in the form of perceptible marks on a surface. Speech is formed by syllables that are constructed in the body and emitted through the mouth, where hard and soft sounds with wavering intonation are filtered through the acoustic mechanism of the throat, and are shaped by the tongue and lips. Texture and text originate from the Indo-European word “teks” meaning to weave, to fabricate. It is a word for a craftsperson, one who builds, one who manipulates an accumulation of small units into something useful, something to trade, something symbolic.

Artists often play with these ideas. They jiggle symbols into alternately meaningful and confusing relationships, build patterns from distinct marks, and create objects that are meant to have special value. Artworks, like writing, are graphic and reference both words and images. And the evolution of writing is linked to pictures, as the earliest forms of written communication are depictions of animals in caves, pigmented rubbings and scratches on dark stone walls that say “I was here, I saw this, I have feelings about this thing I saw.”

-Jennifer Coates