Car Hole Gallery Presents: Bubble Letters

Car Hole Gallery Presents: Bubble Letters
Friday 7 May 2010
6-10 PM

feat:
Amy Bernstein (Portland, OR)
&
Annabel Roberts-McMichael (Brooklyn, NY)


-Sam Korman
Car Hole Gallery
114 SE 12th Ave
PDX 97214
carholegallery@gmail.com


Check out the statement after the jump! 

Car Hole Gallery Presents: Bubble Letters

Feat: Amy Bernstein (Portland, OR)

Annabel Roberts-McMichael (Brooklyn, NY)

Friday 7 May 2010

It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning

something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

-Susan Sontag Notes on Camp

Bubble Letters is a show presented by __________ featuring

(local gallery)

new work by Amy Bernstein and Annabel Roberts-McMichael. At

first, you must remember bubble letters: an alphabet as glossy,

distorting and bulbous as your 12 year-old baby fat face. It

signifies the period of cute sincerity just before you enter an

ongoing maturity known as adulthood. Every letter belies textual

adolescences. ______________, ______________, ___________,

(middle school crush) (band name) (greeting)

______________, etc may have donned the cover of your five-star

(class name)

binder, the tops of your homework, your __________ or _________.

(personal documents)

These may be your associations not with the content, but with

the rough, immature, youthful font, gaining its significance

each time you drafted it across your possessions. In this way,

you outgrew bubble letters, as they may mark an ______________

(epoch)

and you gradually rid yourself of many of those possessions

(though they may still appear on mix CDs or parcel post).

Not everything can be written in bubble letters. Certain

histories become manifest in _______________, sometimes at odds

(text form)

with the _______________ of the statement. They aestheticize and

(end object)

anesthetize the word depicted, substituting or suffusing the

intended meaning with cuteness, acceptability,________—in short,

(political agenda)

sincerity, that ________________________________ for production,

(advertising slogan)

whose presence draws upon our sympathy toward any enterprise

given the right ______________. Bubble letters shirk any serious

(print/web media)

usage. For instance, the word ____________ (an extreme example)

(historical atrocity)

in bubble letters exemplifies this psychological contradiction,

as typeface and word carry opposing significance. Text takes on

a normalizing character at the expense of an _______________ and

(an experience)

perhaps ________________________. It forces surface, print, type

(psychological association)

and handcrafted sincerity upon something generally suited to

________________, __________________, first-hand testimonials or

(official font) (academic discipline)

_________________________. It is a conflation of paradoxes where

(primary visual document)

the mind does not wish to reduce importance to banal expression

nor does it accept the official nature of the latter against

___________________. It confuses the oral, the experiential, the

(a significant memory)

details with the literate, technological, and general. The

typeface is no longer a whisper, but a statement of its own:

political aesthetization paired with personal banality. Just

imagine bubble letters on your _____________ and pretend to

(memorial)

remember.

What can be done to understand this ______________? The

(an uneasy feeling)

work of Bernstein and Roberts-McMichael exerts the force of the

literal to deconstruct the aestheticization of content and

experience. Bernstein’s work visually traces the history of

abstract painting. It is not a direct question of

_________________________, rather, the internalization of visual

(something artists did a lot in the 70s and 80s)

information, condensing it and objectifying it in a beautifully

neon pallet. The paintings flit between surface and depth, but

the artist creates works directly plugged into this cultural

socket as if the ____________________ of history ran through

(just Wikipedia electricity)

her canvas.

Robert-McMichael’s sculptures locate the conceptual force

contained within _______________. Resting our associations from

(stuff)

the objects, she exposes the mysterious and constructed

relationship we have with material culture and the psychological

impact that these materials have on our interaction ___________.

(overly complicated part of speech that you shouldn’t end a sentence with)

Roberts-McMichael’s’ work drudges banal materialism, attempting

to reveal our finite construction, _______________ life and

(archeological verb)

death from their great burial under _________________. It can be

(Greenberg+Sontag subjects)

said that the work in this show makes itself, relying on the

principle of ___________________ while literalizing its effects.

(the name of the show)

These artists break down the political, patriarchal myth of

objects to reveal their trace histories.

-___________________

(curator of car hole)