Kay Rosen has been making work for almost four decades after a formal education in liguistics. She approaches language in a physical way; focusing on the structure of short phrases, words, and letter forms to affect reading and expand meaning. For Rosen, language is not limited to formal rules, but what is stumbled upon accidentally, in found parts of speech that have the potential to convey meaning non-linguistically. Predictable, cognitive, and linear reading is disrupted and reprocessed as a visual experience.

Rosen’s work is often interpreted as a reaction to certain political events, but the artist purposely resists the urge to attach exclusive meaning to the work; she feels language is fluid and changes with time, context and audience. In the fall of 2008 in the United States however, it is difficult to exclude politics from the large one-word wall painting “Removal From Office” (REMOVAL), with its italicized word part. “Justified,” a two-walled painting facing the street, is characteristically more open-ended, but flexible enough to be plugged into recent political discourse.

Likewise, her message writ large in the 1983 multi-paneled installation at Alexander Gray and Associates, “No Noose Is Good Noose,” in tandem with “Scareful!” is as timely today as it was in the 1980’s.