Kay Rosen

IOU, 2017:
In Rosen’s words, “IOU” is a “found textual treasure which required minor adjustments to color to address major historical wrongs”.  For anyone who has followed the attempts by the corporation, Energy Transfer Partners, to build the Dakota Access Pipeline less than one mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, the message of the letterpress work “IOU” will be clear: both a promise and an apology to that tribe, and by extension, to the many other indigenous peoples whose rights and treaties have been trampled over the years.  As the protocol for approval of these pipelines, such as a thorough Environmental Impact Study, is radically altered by Trump’s orders, “IOU” fashions a simple message out of the heart of the Sioux tribe’s name.

Migration consists of two boards, one with the word, ICELAND” printed on it while the other has IRELAND.  The similarity of the names of the two countries, only one letter apart, presented itself as a sort of found text to Rosen, a situation that demanded to be reconstructed by color in order to make a point.  It couldn’t be more relevant than it is now. While the single blue or green letter, “R” and “C” creates a little visual and semantic disruption, having “migrated” from one name/country to the other, they change the work into a more multi-hued, complex and heterogeneous ‘place’ than it was as a monochromed one.

Something Happened, 2017:
The text on the top right panel reads, CORNER, while the bottom left panel reads, CORONER.  As Richard Klein discusses in his essay about Rosen’s work for her solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Rosen actively chooses the way text occupies the architecture of the page/paper.  The current installation of Something Happened is still only a ‘representation’ of a real-life event, yet it takes the artwork a step further beyond a discrete work on paper by placing the work in a real space jointly shared by the viewer.  Of course the extra “O” suggests that whatever happened wasn’t good.  As both an installation and an edition, the work leaves much space in the middle both literally and figuratively

Kay Rosen traded in her academic-based study of language for language-based art four decades ago, realizing that what she found interesting in language had to be expressed visually, using color, scale, materials, non-linear composition, processes such as drawing and painting, and graphic strategies. Her approach has often been more passive than active in the sense that she doesn’t begin a work by saying, “I am going to deliver this message.” Rather, she responds to language as found material, identifying potential in it that exceeds its normal function as a mode of communication. She manipulates its body parts – letters, letterforms and sequencing, to shape her message. The writer Rhonda Lieberman, who has written insightfully about the work many times, called her as a “revealer of language, showing it doing things that it didn’t know it could do.” The poet Eileen Myles, who has also written on Rosen’s work several times, described what she did as “moving the furniture around.”

“Echoes” is a visual representation of a vocal concept. The word draws on the features of its letterforms – the vertical and horizontal symmetry and non-directionality of “O” and “H” to emulate echoing. The versatility and symmetry of “O” and “H” allow “Echoes” to reflect and intersect itself horizontally and vertically four times over, creating a graphic reverberation. The space of “Echoes” conveys an enclosure, a chamber, where sound has bounced off the left and right and top and bottom edges and landed in the center, reoriented.