Textual Insight: Alejandro Cesarco, John Finneran, Anna Gollwitzer, Timothy Hull, Eduardo Kac, Matt Keegan, Vincent Leong, Yuri Masnyj, Stefana McClure

Textual Insight surveys work looking to this varied function of language and text, ranging from work drawing on direct reference and quotation—thus focused on textual meaning—to the formal qualities of lettering and the handwritten itself.

Language as a floating chain of signifiers, a notion that defines the structuralist definition of language as a system, is fore-grounded in the work of Alejandro Cesarco.

John Finneran’s Unexpected Windstorm jumbles two opaque rhetorical phrases—that are juxtaposed to politicized effect—through a knowingly pinchbeck figurative style.

Language is a sculptural and architectonic element, in both senses of the term, in the work of Anna Gollwitzer.

Timothy Hull’s interest in Egyptology, esoteric knowledge, and the arcane extends to using the words of the Armenian-born mystic G.I. Gurdjieff as pictorial element, a motif both illustrative and almost incantatory.

Eduardo Kac looks to language and text as communication processes, both in their semantic and aesthetic dimensions.

With an interest in the sublimated function of language, Matt Keegan parses out the poetic and political register of words in his Untitled letterpress prints.

Vincent Leong’s digitally animated video How to be Bruce uses graphic elements and simple, non-verbal forms of visual grammar, distilling action into universalized, standard symbols.

Yuri Masnyj subjects the visual order and formal vocabulary of the modernist avant-garde, and its typographical emphasis on form as content, to a perpetual reevaluation.

The structural and visual character of language, from palimpsests to subtitles and the layout of a text on a page, informs the work of Stefana McClure.