Review of A Word In Your Eye

It’s an unremarkable fact that most text we see in our daily lives is created digitally. In the age of blogging and text messaging, who still gets their hands dirty in pursuit of the written word? Evidence that some do can be found at the Marie Lloyd Bar in Hackney. A sundry collection of Hackney-based artists are part of an exhibition entitled A Word In Your Eye, curated by Claire Hynds.

Enlisting media from printmaking and comics to myriad forms of collage, these artists/poets have absconded with our overworked alphabet and rescued it from quotidian use. In doing so, they frequently verge into the territory of the cryptic. Text is distilled to its essence as line, squiggle and decontextualised symbol.

A Word In Your Eye is largely focused on collecting and appropriation, apt themes, considering that collecting and re-processing are elemental to using language itself. The content the exhibition ‘reads’ like a walk down a city street: misheard snippets of conversation, modulated modern chatter and half-glimpsed text and slogans define the general experience. But so many of the art-making methods represented here are detached from contemporary visual culture; they are labor-intensive and a bit “crafty.” But Matt Black’s film stills overlaid with dialogue text are a welcome exception, as is Steve Smith’s graffiti collage. Smith collected the tags of numerous graffiti artists throughout the city and applied them upon a single panel. In the final product, only vague cues denoting scrawled text remain.

The failures of language serve as the show’s other leitmotiv. Susan Mackervoy‘s coy prints – part etching, part photocopy, part rubber stamp – present lightly knocked-together linguistic fragments. Although they betray an air of indecipherability, the prints are not vexing. Rather, they possess a character common to much of the work on display: in the process of exploring the visual aspects of communication (stymied or otherwise), they bring to light the visual nature of poetry.

Review by Emily Candela.
A Word In Your Eye is at The Marie Lloyd Bar, 289 Mare Street, Hackney until the 29th September.