“I was watching my kids and how often they text messaged each other back and forth, and it seemed like they were speaking, not so much with their mouths, as they were with their fingers,” James MacDevitt, the director of the Cerritos College Art Gallery, said.
This connection between spoken word and written word was the initial inspiration for MacDevitt to put on the new “inSCRIPTion” art show, which is on exhibit in the art gallery from Nov. 8 to Dec. 9.
The show explores the conjunction of text, words, and letters, with images and action.
“I wanted to sort of put together a show that involved words that were either moving, or words that require that you move in one way or another, whether it’s physically or mentally,” MacDevitt said.
Various artists expressed these ideas through their presented pieces in the show.
Jim Jenkins, a sculpting instructor at the California State University of Fullerton, is one of the artists whose work was exhibited.
One of his pieces was a motorized and self-propelling sculpture of the word “NO.”
Jenkins’s sculpture crawled a lap around Falcon Square for students and passersby to witness during the show’s reception on Nov. 9 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Jenkins says he specializes in kinetic sculpture of this nature.
He said about the conceptualization of the piece, “The word ‘no’ is something that intrigued me because it’s one of the first words we can say as children, and as adults, it’s a word that you just hear way too often.”
Jenkins believed this particular piece accurately represented the show’s overall theme.
“The words themselves can become subject matter for art, and taken out of the context of a book, or a page,” he said.
Other artists’ works include the likes of words being presented as architecture, eye charts that ask you to reconstruct the words the have been fragmented by the structure of the eye chart, paintings of websites, pictures turned into digital code where the original images are destroyed, and even books where the written words have been completely removed.
Penny Young, an artist from Burbank, is best known for the motorized Rolodexes she contributed to the show.
This piece consisted of three Rolodexes filled with revolving cards that displayed Young’s own writing.
Observers are encouraged to push a button next to each Rolodex that makes it flip to a random area, so that they get a random card to read.
Young quickly and automatically typed thoughts as they occurred to her on every card. Sample include “French Bulldog pups” and “critters eating the bugs in your lawn,” among others.
“I think it’s kind of having to do with how you find text around you or how you’re involved with it on kind of a random way,” she said about the piece’s correlation with the art show.
MacDevitt said of “inSCRIPTion’s” differing styles, “There’s a lot of variety within the context of the show, but what they all have in common is this ambiguous relationship between text and image, and the actions that they produce from the viewer.”
“inSCRIPTion” is open to students and the general public at the Cerritos College Art Gallery until Dec. 9.
