GALLERY 2

XYZ: Alphabetical Ruptures and Reformations

8 Jul. - 4 Sep. 2022

Tauba Auerbach, Dexter Sinister, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, and Caroline Kent.

Curated by Sophie Landres.

KinoSaito Art Center is pleased to announce XYZ: Alphabetical Ruptures and Reformations, a group show examining how alphabetical systems appear in a variety of contemporary art practices. Curated by Sophie Landres, the exhibition will be on view July 8 - September 4, 2022 and include work by Tauba Auerbach, Dexter Sinister, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, and Caroline Kent.

How do letters speak to us when encountered outside of linguistic constructions? What do their formal attributes reveal about history, power, and cultural values? Why have so many artists looked to the alphabet as both a wellspring of creativity and a proxy to contest social orders writ large? This exhibition considers how letters signify when estranged from literal signification. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, and experimental typography, the artists in XYZ approach alphabets as systems that are rife with ambiguity and instability but organize our consciousness and social worlds nonetheless. 

By alphabetizing all the letters that appear in a standard edition of the Bible, Tauba Auerbach follows a logical system to its illogical conclusion, yielding an abstract pattern that maintains the meditative and mysterious qualities of its source material. Their drawings on the edges of Helm Wotzkow’s instructive The Art of Hand-Lettering similarly seek to expand perceptions of manually and mechanically reproduced letters. Dexter Sinister’s animated essay traces the historical relationship between typography and the “intelligence of alphabets,” beginning with theories of divine proportions, through the Enlightenment’s mathematical rationality, to the indeterminacy of digital code. Written in a self-referential typeface that was programmed to be in perpetual motion, the essay is equal parts medium and message. “New York” appears in mirrored letters in Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds’ site-specific welcome signs that reposition Native American tribes as the hosts of their ancestral land. The double inversion of symbols and symbolic claims to land draws attention to how alphabets play a role in forced assimilation and colonial occupation. Caroline Kent’s paintings are comprised of letterforms that circumvent legibility. Critiquing language as inherently limited and exclusionary, she revives Modernist abstraction into arrangements of repeated markings that privilege nonnormative modes of communication. In aggregate, XYZ demonstrates the paradoxically restrictive yet infinitely generative form and function of alphabets.

Tauba Auerbach’s work (b. 1981, San Francisco, California) addresses principles of topology, symbology, and logic, probing the patterns and slippages therein. Though best known for their painting, Auerbach works in a wide variety of media including weaving, glass, photography, 3D printing, bookmaking, and musical instrument design. In 2013, they founded Diagonal Press to formalize their ongoing publishing practice. Major shows of their work have been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, which traveled to venues in Sweden and Belgium. Her work has also been exhibited in a number of major museum shows, notably Oracle at The Broad (2017); the Museum of Modern Art's Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language (2012); the Walker Art Center’s Lifelike (2012); The Indiscipline of Painting at Tate St. Ives (2011-12); the 2010 Whitney Biennial; MoMA P.S.1’s Greater New York (2010) and the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus (2009). In 2011 she received the Smithsonian Institution’s Artist Research Fellowship Award. In 2018, the Public Art Fund organized Auerbach’s acclaimed public project, Flow Separation, in New York Harbor. Auerbach’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; among others.

Dexter Sinister is the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey. David graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1993, Yale University in 1999, and went on to form O-R-G, a design studio in New York City. Stuart graduated from the University of Reading in 1994, the Werkplaats Typografie in 2000, and co-founded the arts journal Dot Dot Dot the same year. David currently teaches at Princeton University. Stuart currently teaches at The University of Geneva. In 2006, Dexter Sinister established a workshop in the basement at 38 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side in New York City. The workshop intended to model a ‘Just-In-Time’ economy of print production, running counter to the contemporary assembly-line realities of large-scale publishing. This involved avoiding waste by working on-demand, utilizing local cheap machinery, considering alternate distribution strategies, and collapsing distinctions of editing, design, production and distribution into one efficient activity. In 2011, together with Angie Keefer they set up The Serving Library, a not-for-profit cooperatively-built archive that assembles itself by publishing. The project’s engine is Dot Dot Dot’s successor Bulletins of The Serving Library – a journal that circulates as freely downloadable PDFs as well as a biannual print edition.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954, Wichita, Kansas) has exhibited his works at The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations Reservation, Oklahoma; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; Documenta, Kassal, Germany; Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland; University Art Museum, Berkeley, California; Association for Visual Arts Museum, Cape Town, South Africa; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; Hong Kong Art Center, China; Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia; Grand Palais, Paris, France; Nanyang Technological University Art Gallery, Singapore; and the Venice Biennale, Italy. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; Denver Art Museum, Denver; Museum of Contemporary Native American Art, Santa Fe; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Harold Washington Library, Chicago; the Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Canada; Simon Fraser University Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; British Museum, London; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; Anchorage Museum, Anchorage; and the Library of Congress. Heap of Birds has taught at Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design and at the University of Oklahoma where he is now Professor Emeritus in the Native American Studies Department. He has received grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts (2012), the Andy Warhol Foundation (2004), Bonfil Stanton Foundation (2002), The Pew Charitable Trust (2000), AT&T (1999), Lila Wallace Foundation (1994), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1989), and the Rockefeller Foundation (1987), was named USA Ford Fellow in 2012 and Distinguished Alumni, University of Kansas, in 2014, and received Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts and Letters degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (2008), Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (2017), and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, (2018).  In 2020, Heap of Birds was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Caroline Kent (b. 1975, Sterling, Illinois) is a visual artist based in Chicago, best known for her large scale abstract works. Inspired by her personal experiences and Mexican heritage, Kent creates paintings that explore the power and limitations of communication. Kent earned a BS in Art at Illinois State University (1998) and an MFA at the University of Minnesota (2008). Kent has exhibited at numerous institutions including The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Flag Art Foundation, New York; The DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Depaul Art Museum, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Macalester College, Saint Paul; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Kent is a 2020 Artadia Chicago Awardee, and has received grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation. In 2018, she was a Fellow at Paint School, a New York-based program of Shandaken Projects. Kent is Assistant Professor of Art, Theory and Practice, at Northwestern University, IL.

Sophie Landres is a curator, professor of Visual Studies at The New School, and Director of River Valley Arts Collective. Before joining RVAC, Sophie served as the Program Manager of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts. She was previously the Curator of Public Programs and Education at the Museum of Art and Design at Miami-Dade College (MOAD), where she curated exhibitions and performances including Forensic Architecture: True to Scale, Navild and Sosa: Black Power Naps/Siestas Negras, Andros Zins Browne: The Chaos Opera, and Paul Ramírez Jonas: Alternative Facts, along with numerous discursive and educational programs. While at MOAD, she also spearheaded a partnership with The Idea Center, produced Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's La Quarta Jicotea installation for Where the Oceans Meet curated by MOAD, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza, and Gabriela Rangel, and taught a workshop on how Theaster Gates's urban revitalization strategies could inform creative placemaking in Miami's historically underinvested neighborhoods. From 2014 to 2015, Sophie was the Mellon Global Initiatives Fellow, helping develop Creative Time’s project for the Venice Biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor. She has also held positions at arts organizations including the Museum of Modern Art, artnet, Art in General, Mireille Mosler, Ltd., and Naked Duck Gallery, and independently curated exhibitions with work by Zarouhie Abdalian, Liz Collins, Ala Dehghan, Brock Enright, Faile, Zipora Fried, Kate Gilmore, Jules Gimbrone, Jennie C. Jones, Lovid, Sarah Meyohas, Shoplifter, Daniel Subkoff, and Saya Woolfalk, among many others. Sophie has a Ph.D. in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University, an M.F.A. in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Iowa. She has taught courses on art writing and curatorial studies at Columbia University and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, interdisciplinary seminars at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and a variety of art history courses at Stony Brook University. Her writing has appeared in Art Comments, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Degree Critical, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, among other peer-reviewed journals, art critical publications, and exhibition catalogues.