In the beginning it was a mental image, but then people created signs – symbols, icons, scripts – to communicate ideas and languages that initially can only be heard and sounded. The discovery of scripts changed man’s oral tradition to a written communication. Human civilization was born because human made their history through the invention of scripts
Alphabets have become one of the dominant and meaningful symbolic representations of all history. Our modern world is surrounded by countless script, regularly or irregularly arranged; real or only in our mind. Scripts make words, writings, sentences and narrative on books, magazines, advertisement boards, mobile phones and computer screens, t-shirts and even underwear.
Scripts are institutionalized by verbal language nowadays. Writing culture has turned script beyond the object that attached to communication and language conventions. Many times we just forget that a script is also a visual object – personal imagination trails and fantasy.
Ebon Heath, an artist from Brooklyn, New York, has an eternal obsession on scripts, words and language as more than just a verbal idiom. His project, Stereo.type (1994 - now) explores script and words in a physical entity that is impossible to appear in grammatical and writing conventions. Resembling to a ‘visual poetry’, the series can be categorized as sculptures, installations or three-dimensional objects. It shows the scripts arrangement and words that Ebon quotes and arrays thoroughly from many sources. Ebon Heath presents the script and words as hanging mobiles, swirling as a ballerina, piling them up like a group of ants, scattered like floating pieces of puzzle or floating around like an asteroid burst. Seeing such rhythmical script, we don’t need to read it one by one to understand their meaning. The entity sensation and visual composition already speaks for itself.
In the process of his visual research, Ebon gets inspired from many industrial and organic structures, such as fish nets, animal vertebrae, dolls, kites, bird feathers, parachutes and also high couture clothing – crossing cultures from Brooklyn, Andalusia, Berlin, Marrakech, London and Trinidad. Stereo.type basically explores the balance between personal imagination with urban global environment that is f polluted with word trash and language noises. Recently Heath also blends his typographic objects with human body, creating the Stereo.type as jewelry and wearable art.
Regarding Stereo.type, he once said: " All the audio and verbal noise, from music we plug our ears with to the din of countless conversations, screams and whispers. With new media of texting, online, and transmitted technology there is even invisible noise silent to the eye surrounding us all. It is this cozy womb of information, data, or chorus of cacophony that my mobiles hope to represent as well as reveal: making the invisible visible." A rising star, artist and designer, through many international exhibitions and art projects, Ebon Heath is also a visiting professor in Lehman College, New York and art director at Mindpirates, Berlin.
Ebon Heath: Stereo.type
April 17th 2009 through May 15th 2010
Opening on April 17th 2010 at 7 pm.
Kendra Gallery
Jl. Drupadi no. 88B
Basangkasa, Seminyak
40294 Bali
T. +62361736628
E. enquiries@kendragallery.com
Text: Agung Hujatnikajennong
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