UNIT/PITT Projects

Too Many Words

Donna Akrey, Blair Brennan, Graham Gillmore, Jason de Haan, Colleen Heslin, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Laurie Ljubojevic, Joshua Lovelace, Michael Maranda, Sherwin Tjia
Curated by Lance Blomgren

Too Many Words is an exhibition that brings together a diverse selection of artists who take the role of reading as a central preoccupation and site of creative inquiry. Using a variety of strategies, the artists in this exhibition share a common engagement with the ways in which reading is enacted, experienced and represented in contemporary life, as well as their own artistic practice.

The works in Too Many Words cast a critical eye upon not only what we read or the role of reading in society, but also how reading is done: the experiential underpinnings of this phenomenon. The paintings, video, drawings, sculptures, text-projects and book-works that comprise the exhibition push our more commonplace expectations of reading—entertainment and knowledge, signification and meaning, transmission and reception—into conceptions of representation, subjectivity, nostalgia, authorship, literary inspiration, nostalgia, cultural memory, consumerism and obsession. In this exhibition the private and public faces of the words that surround us are conflated. As Too Many Words suggests, the overwhelming profusion of words which gives rhythm to everyday life involves an ongoing barter between the solitary, individual pleasure of reading and the blunt, passionless facades presented by words in our public environment.