OF THE SIGN: Marjorie Welish in Conversation with David Grubbs
Please join The Flow Chart Foundation for a conversation between artist/poet Marjorie Welish and composer/musician David Grubbs in conjunction with OF THE SIGN: Art by Marjorie Welish—Paintings/Artist Books/Provocations at the Flow Chart Space (note: gallery opens at 11, the conversation and performance will take place at 2pm). The program will include a musical performance.
THE SIGN: Art by Marjorie Welish—Paintings/Artist Books/Provocations at the Flow Chart Space (note: gallery opens at 11, the conversation till take place at 3pm).
The Flow Chart Foundation’s newly accessible Flow Chart Space is featuring the work of artist and poet Marjorie Welish. The exhibition—Of the Sign—features selections from an ongoing series of diagrammatic works that address the questions: Can the sign of barrier tape be an actual prohibition that shifts to that of permission? What is the semiotic of this undoing and remaking?
Acrylic imitating tape is the material simulation, undergoing iterations more and more altered—altered through procedural moves: sliced and splaying, and so reoriented slantwise, off-course; folded, hence obscuring itself; or with fragments of the tape as remainders, etc. Meanwhile, fugitive cultural knowledge emerges from alignment and realignment, overlap and obscurity: a slipping glimpse of chevron or harlequin emerges and disappears in the rippling distortions that have been induced; selvage quilting or sawtooth cubism can be glimpsed otherwise, as intertext. Given the signage of yellow/black, is only barrier tape productive of potential sense?
The exhibition includes paintings and artist books, as well as continuous running video moving through a book work. Visitors will receive a set of provocations—questions to ponder while viewing the show, specially created for this exhibition.
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, as well as with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, Spark of Hudson, and Friends of The Flow Chart Foundation.
Artist/critic Marjorie Welish received her first solo show thanks to Laurie Anderson, then curator of the Whitney Museum Art Resources Center. She has exhibited most recently in New York, Paris, Vienna, and Cambridge, England. Welish has received many grants and fellowships, including: Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, The Fifth Floor Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Trust for Mutual Understanding (supporting an exchange between the International Studio Program, New York and the Artists’ Museum, Łódź, Poland). In 2006, she received a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowship to teach at the University of Frankfurt, where she also worked on a limited-edition constructed art book, Oaths? Questions? in collaboration with James Siena, published by Granary Books in 2009 (and now in the collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale, Columbia University, the Getty Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art). In 2010 with a Fulbright, she was at Edinburgh College of Art. In 2015 she was nominated for the award Anonymous Was a Woman. Writing on her work may be found in Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Foundation), which assembles papers given at a conference on April 5, 2002, at the University of Pennsylvania. Welish’s collection of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press). Marjorie Welish, a member of the board of the International Studio and Curatorial Program, writes art criticism for Art Monthly [U.K.]. In addition to multiple private and corporate collections, public collections of Welish’s work include: Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Bowdoin College, Brunswick, MN; British Museum; Brooklyn Museum, NYC; Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK; Colby College Museum of Art, MN; Columbia University, New York (Rare Books); Davis Museum, Wellesley College, MA; Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, NY; Getty Library, Los Angeles, CA; Koehnline Museum, Oakton, MI; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson New York Public Library, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rutgers (University) Archive for Printmaking Studios, New Brunswick, NJ; Smith College, Northampton, MA; U.S.Department of State: American Embassy, Armenia; and American Embassy, Moldova. Her work is represented by Emanuel von Baeyer (London).
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David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City). Grubbs has released fifteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases, and is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch.
