Eleven Rivington is pleased to present a group exhibition of nine artists using a diverse range of text-based approaches in works on paper, sculpture, photography, and video. Titled Character Generator, the exhibition is curated by Matthew Lyons and is on view from July 9 – August 14, 2009.

Character Generator brings together a select group of works by artists who continue the ‘turn to language’ in contemporary art practice to highlight subtle intersections between the political, the poetic, and the personal. Whether by producing, excerpting, combining, or applying chance-based systems to words, these artists explore the multiple potentialities in text and in its enunciation to generate social and emotional meaning.

Knowles’s typewriter pieces result from various idiosyncratic systems for accumulating and ciphering text to understand and reflect on the world. Expanding upon his performance project BARR in which he “talks over beats,” Fowler’s works comment on positivity, social struggle, and protest within an underground music scene and beyond. Roysdon’s eyeglasses make a startling announcement that begs follow-up questions, while Ebner’s photograph creates an opportunity for the viewer to formulate his or her own slogan or message. Cerletty’s painting memorializes an awkward phrase he misspoke during a faux-newscast videotaped at school as a teenager. McKenzie and Trepte each investigate the ramifications of what gets left unsaid or is removed in either text or speech. Holmqvist’s spoken word music video draws from a diverse range of sources from Beat poetry, especially Ginsberg’s Howl, to pop music lyrics, especially Madonna. Discoteca Flaming Star places phrases of particular personal and/or cultural significance onto found rugs to create melancholic sites that often honor past artistic legacies, while underlining the performative agency of the individual in the present.

Matthew Lyons is Curator at The Kitchen NY where he has organized solo exhibitions by Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Glen Fogel, Vlatka Horvat, Jenny Perlin, and Mika Tajima as well as performances by Final Fantasy, Jutta Koether, Aki Onda, and robbinschilds, among others. His writing has appeared in ASPECT, Flash Art, Movement Research Performance Journal, and Work the Room: A Handbook of Performance Strategies.

Concurrently on view in the office will be a project by French artist Olivier Babin. The installation, OLIVIER BABIN: I MEAN / YOU KNOW will be comprised of a visual haiku composed of 5 framed Braille works and a cast bronze nail; as a grouping, the works form a coded sentence, a rebus, a syllogism.