V&A is pleased to announce “Cousins of Reggae,” a group exhibition on view from October 13th through November 3rd, 2007. Each of the four artists in this exhibition creates text-related work as a way to express the limits of ideology.

Blake Hargreaves uses spray paint and traditional materials over album covers to subvert their original meanings, creating new connotations that reconfigure the existing images. His seemingly random texts create a new context for the images, creating seemingly prophetic verse.

Ryan Iverson’s drawings of Modern terms and forms reveal amusement at ideology. In this show, twisted figures and geometric renderings hang next to a cheery drawing of a man working; the word “DEPRESSION” looming over him. In another piece, the word “COMMUNISM” conspicuously grows out of a field that a man is farming.

Sabrina Mansouri’s woodblock print of an antique Oujia board demystifies its spiritual purpose by emphasizing the formal properties of the board’s design. The print’s shady fingerprint suggests a lack of commitment to the device’s function. The piece here is a residual spirit – a reminder of the Ouija’s `questionable’ power and our own searching for answers.

A statement on artist’s “rights” – a narrative piece by Kevin Bewersdorf – details the artist’s confrontation with a woman who finds it offensive that he surreptitiously photographs people in public places. His determined account is accompanied by photographs that, through formal consideration, reveal the ideology of others.

As in the Avant-Garde tradition, the artists here rely on self-expression as the inspiration for making art, however, each questions the associated Avant-Garde belief that aesthetic appeal is secondary to context.