Kay Rosen: Short Stories/Tall Tales

While the adage, pictures are worth a thousand words, points to the endless interpretive and descriptive possibilities offered by visual representations, the specificity of language and words themselves are generally thought to offer more incisive meanings. Kay Rosen upsets this order by using language as the subject of her paintings, turning words themselves into pictorial images that explore the vicissitudes of language. The work asks viewers to explore the ways meanings are read, derived, and decoded from language by using puns, repetitions, abrogating conventional grammatical rules, and examining the graphical properties of words themselves. With a text by exhibition organizer Jennifer Riddell.