sub-TEXT:
A Sala Diaz/Transformer Exchange Project

September 18 – October 16, 2004

Transformer
Washington, D.C.

Jesse Amado

Andréa Caillouet

Chuck Ramirez

sub-TEXT explores the hidden, implied and underlying content of words and texts when they are taken out of their original context and re-presented in another. Using text as a central image, or as a vehicle to invoke images, the artists in sub-TEXT expand our understanding of how words are deciphered and meaning is constructed through visual literacy. Focusing on three distinct sites where words and texts are deployed, these new art works explore advertising, cinema and the library to reveal the malleability of language and the graphic power of text to persuade and to move us.

As a former graphic designer for a large Texas grocery chain, Chuck Ramirez is fully versed in the language of advertising. With its seductive vocabulary of signs, logos, and slogans, commercial advertising can be skillfully crafted to create desire and fuel consumption. Equating brand identity with identity politics, Ramirez humorously comments on how cultural identity can be (in)formed and expressed by the choices we make as consumers.

Working primarily with commercial photography, typography and computer imaging, Ramirez utilizes the tools from his former occupation to produce his text- and photo-based art works. In a new series of prints, Ingredients, 2002, the artist borrows entire blocks of text from ingredient labels found on processed food products and reprints them in bold relief on hand-made paper. His deadpan approach is more quotation than explanation, linking it closer to the conceptual work of Levine, than Kosuth. Far from a preachy commentary about American junk food, the artist unapologetically admits that these products can be found in his own kitchen pantry.

Hamburger Helper, Cool Whip Extra Creamy, Deluxe Macaroni and Cheese, Ranch Dressing, Rice Krispie Treats, Spaghettios, Strawberry Pop-Tarts

In "What's your thing?," 2004, a site-responsive work displayed on the storefront window of the Transformer project space, Ramirez revisits a strategy from a previous window-text installation in which he had listed everything he bought during a typical week in his home town of San Antonio. The numerous products and brand names items purchased by the artist formed an archive that could be read almost like an autobiography. To the viewer-reader, it was abundantly obvious that the unidentified consumer of certain brand-name jeans, iced coffee drinks and breakfast tacos was a 30-something, gay Latino male, affecting a trendy, arte-boheme lifestyle. "What's your thing?" is another such pseudo-narrative, this one a running list of television commercial pitch lines. The upbeat slogans and sound bites seem to promise the world, but taken out of context their words ring hollow and go nowhere.

Get more out of life; For people who hate to wait; Good taste is easy to recognize; See how much you can save; Reveal the goodness in you;

Inspired by art cinema classics, Jesse Amado has imbued a new series of post-minimalist, conceptual art works with narrative content taken from screenplays and movie subtitles. Part homage and part experiment, Amado channels the reductive qualities of his sculptures and installations into a new body of work about the cinematic experience. Focusing our attention on the textual components of filmmaking which work in tandem with the imagery to construct narratives, Amado makes us aware of the interdependency of words and images in visual culture, and challenges us to reexamine how we "read" them.

In his video, Subtitles, (Exterminating Angel), 2001 Amado severely re-edits Luis Buñuel's Spanish language film El Angel Exterminador, (1962), cutting out all but the footage that contains the subtitles. Against a backdrop of constantly changing film stills, the subtitles flash on and off in compressed time. What remains of the film is a fractured and ambiguous narrative, very much in keeping with Buñuel's disclaimer, "The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there is no explanation."

Is this natural? Let’s sleep.

Amado continues to mine cinematic narratives in a related wall panel triptych entitled Screenplay (Un Chien Andalu), 2003. Deceptively understated in hues of grey, the surface of the triptych is densely textured with rows of "Dymo Label Maker" strips which have been laboriously imprinted with the entire movie script of Un Chien Andalou (1929). 's film, created in collaboration with Salvador Dalí,, is a surrealist classic best known for its violent content and irrational montage of images. As the viewer scans the surface of Amado's Screenplay, random words or phrases may appear to stand out and converge into a web of associations.

They continue their walk on the beach, little by little fading from view, while in the sky appear the words: IN THE SPRING. Everything has changed.

Just as language has its origins, words too have history and resonance. Andréa Caillouet's one-word text messages appear in unexpected places, sometimes emboldened on commercial billboards, and sometimes printed on small pieces of folded paper that the artist clandestinely inserts into library books. Encountered by chance, and presented without context, these enigmatic word graphics confound and incite the viewer to decode them, becoming subliminally registered into memory in the process.

LONGING BELONGING LONGING BELONGING

Caillouet is drawn to what she calls the "onomatopoetic" qualities of the word "longing," a word that is spoken slowly and smoothly. Pairing the word "longing" with "belonging" exaggerates their legato qualities, and muddles their individual characteristics as they are read and reread in repetitive fashion. These are simple, yet evocative, words that trigger emotion and invite introspection.

Fortunes, 2004, is an origami-like puzzle that is opened and closed with both hands to expose different messages printed on the interior folds of the paper. It is a child's game of chance selection that is played with a "he loves me, he loves me not" kind of circular gesture. In Caillouet's rendition of the game, there is only one word to be read in each puzzle, ("LONGING" or "BELONGING") and is examined and reexamined each time it is opened. The artist extends this gesture of circularity by taking these evocative word puzzles outside of the art gallery and into public libraries, where they can be discovered and rediscovered again and again.

Henry Estrada, Guest Curator