THE TEXT IS THE MESSAGE | GALLERY

EXPANDED.ART presents the group show THE TEXT IS THE MESSAGE. AN EXHIBITION OF MIXED MESSAGES at the gallery in Berlin. What would Marshall McLuhan write today? Very likely text messages. The global village is now largely connected via messenger apps and social media. Life is closeness to strangers and friends, changing every second. Thoughts and feelings are shared as they are thought and lived.

The global village flourishes because of text messages, chats, emails, and social media postings that we share online. Artists like Joachim Bosse with his SELECTED FRAMES and Andy Kassier with THOUGHTS FROM THE UNIVERSE channel the emotional state and world of thoughts of a generation that feels everything at the same time while typing and transform the stream of feelings into text messages. The artists write on paper by hand, as if they had to make sure that the diary is actually still being written and that something remains for posterity.

TWEETS FROM TWITTER is a series of text-based works that, in a different world, Anika Meier would have turned into full-length writing. It’s an invitation to the recipients to take the questions or statements and find answers for themselves channeling and documenting a moment in art history together with Meier: the age of Post-NFTism.

A meme combines humor with a cultural, social, or political expression. The most powerful memes will always rise to the top and then eternally return. What Claudia Hart did with her iconic project A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was to add a little spice and give power to all things Machiavellian: the will to power and the dynamics of personal relationships. From the past, to the present, and into the future. A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was initially written and illustrated by Hart in 1995. It was inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, THE PRINCE, the first book of political philosophy.

In celebration of youth culture and coming-of-age tropes, "NO, DON'T DISAPPEAR [WM-2]" from Skye Nicolas' Walkman series elevates portable music devices such as the Sony Walkman as cerebral or dematerialized readymades: conceptual digital representations of physical objects contextualized as digital artifacts containing data. The series typifies Nicolas' pixel paintings in which remixed images are reduced to their essential structure, the outline. Graphic elements are streamlined into nebulous shimmering pixels that dance across the contrasting dark background of the digital canvas. Declarative statements glide across the screen (often lifted from 1980’s and 1990’s era song lyrics), serve as both internal dialogue and a crucial visual detail to complete the digital painting’s overall composition. The result of this process of reduction and layered storytelling is a visually poetic distillation in which the viewer finds themselves occupying; an intangible dreamscape atmosphere arousing an induced nostalgia that seduces and captivates the senses.

ILLUMINATED by Emily Edelman explores communication beyond what written language can reach. We find feeling—and meaning—in the bright wash of an epiphany, in the sound of familiar voices, or in the design of a book. Words alone can do so much, but some things remain in the space just beyond them. The characters Edelman used in ILLUMINATED do not belong to any language. They were created using a variant of the typographic generative algorithm for ASEMICA, Art Blocks Curated NFT Drop from 2021.

POEMS FOR DAMIEN HIRST by Jurgen Ostarhild is a series of text images based on the spot paintings by Damien Hirst. Each color spot was assigned the corresponding hexadecimal code (hex code). The size, proportions, and titles of the originals have been retained. A special monospace font designed for this series allows the six alphanumeric characters that make up a hex code to be mapped as a circular area. This work examines the color representations of color field painting in the 20th century. Although artists use painting to try to represent the truth of their time, their products are subject to various chemical aging processes. The chromaticity of the colors used changes over time. However, the colors do not change synchronously, i.e., red fades differently from blue or yellow. Every pigment and every binder ages differently. There are chromatic shifts in the color values.

Artists: Joachim Bosse, Emily Edelman, Claudia Hart, Andy Kassier, Anika Meier, Skye Nicolas, and Jurgen Ostarhild.