Language as Shapes

Karl Erickson and Andrew Falkowski
The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI
August 27 - October 3, 2022
http://www.thesuburban.org/

"Language as Shapes," by Karl Erickson and Andrew Falkowski, uses language to both express and examine the limits of where sense and meaning evolve, and perhaps more appropriately, devolve. This is the fifth collaborative project by the artists. This show is an installation consisting of looping 3D animated videos, text-based collage paintings, bespoke t-shirts, and cast plaster chains.

In "Language as Shapes" Erickson and Falkowski push semiotics towards a poetically absurd kind of psychedelia. Through different materials, both explore how the form of letters and words morphs language into nonsensical loops. Erickson and Falkowski push language into a glossolalia for our hyper-specific times, uttering logically expressed nonsense wedged between the semiotic and the abstract. Language as Shapes devolves into formal properties in order to play with the epistemological threshold of language as a communicative device.

Erickson’s video series are part of an absurdist take on educational programming for children, from Sesame Street to algorithmically produced animations on Youtube. This video series shows how communication is not a fixed, efficient form. Rather, it is malleable, illogical, and physical. These animations find some way of getting an educational lesson mostly, but not entirely, wrong. For instance, a 3d animated puppet ‘monster’ is chewing on the letter R, while making the repeated “arr-arr-arrr” growling sound. Letters fall, spelling the word “are,” confusing the matter of the letter “R”, sliding from ‘meaning’, to sound, to shape. It’s in the slippage between different types of address that complicate the ways in which we transmit and interpret meaning.

Like Erickson’s videos, Falkowski’s collages use grammar school esthetics to create a graphic palimpsest of ransom note collages. Coloring book pages, dot-to-dot pages, glitter stickers and ransom note letters, collected from labels, junk mail, candy wrappers are filled out improvisationally, lending themselves to the same kind of willful misinterpretation for the same exploratory sensibility as Erickson’s videos.

And, like the video loop's use of language and educational practices, Falkowski’s chains confound the conventional use of chains as an imposing barrier. These cast plaster chain links are cast pigment, a form of 'Secco Fresco', in dream-like tie dye swirls and expressive flashes of paint. The chains revolve endlessly like an Orobouros, creating a confounding and repeating object that is both formed and formless. Like Erickson's video loops, the chain functions like a repeating 'sentence', spiraling toward and away from a legible communicative grammar, prioritizing discoveries gleaned from intuitive investigation.

Thinking of language as a shape, a sound, a composition and a somatic utterance, Erickson and Falkowski experiment with the various ways we go through the improbable task of translating private impulses into messages for a world of others. Their works change the pace of reading and comprehension, creating a slippage in presumed knowledge and expectations, exposing the intrinsic frailty of communication. Erickson’s and Falkowski’s work rejoices in the malleability of meaning in language. The goal is to put the viewer in a state of presentness and to take on a state of beginner’s mind.

Karl Erickson

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Language as Shapes