![]() ![]() One side is standard rule, the other college rule. In one corner of the gallery, he papers over two connecting walls, floor-to-ceiling, with enlarged decals that look like blown-up versions of ruled paper. Instead, he reminds us of the voids we are expected to fill in with linguistic expression. Though there isn’t a single word on display. Indeed, this exhibit has more than two dozen objects, and all of them are about language. No doubt, Swanson is more interested in the structures of language than words themselves. The work gets at the physical quality of erasers, that we like to squeeze, fondle and play with them, but also at their function, by taking something that is formally meant to remove something and using it to do the opposite - to create something - though the function of the new object might be debatable. ![]() Like, for example,”How Many Pink Pearl Erasers Would it Take to Create a Perfect Cube?,” which is the name of a piece that borrows the sort of query found on a standardized test and then answers it with hundreds of fleshy, stubby, pink erasers stacked into an object that stands one-foot by one-foot by one-foot square. Rather than serving as commentary, though, it really attempts to raise questions. Those pieces set the tone for “Eight-and-a-Half-by-Eleven,” which often feels playful, though sometimes gets very serious. As an homage to the idea that the really interesting passages of a cereal box are on the back, he turns it around, reversing the letters so they read backwards. He explores this in another piece, where he takes the logo off of a box of Trix, enlarges it and casts it in black, powder-coated aluminum, creating a two-dimensional wall sculpture. Like a lot of children, Swanson recalls that he eschewed books in his short attention-span years and learned to read mostly through the endless, repeated scanning of cereal boxes as he ate breakfast. So many of these conundrums come up when we are first introduced to language and this exhibit dwells heavily in a place few serious art shows dare to go: kid land, a place populated by five-year-olds and the things they love, like crayons, and “Sesame Street” and alphabet books.Īnd more cereal. Wednesday, July 12th 2023 Home Page Close Menu ![]()
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