Art Lies, Volume 39, Summer 2003 Page: 52

                                
ARLINGTON REVIEW

a light discussion
The Art Corridor II, Tarrant County College
Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe

Thomas Feulmer, Simeen Ishaque, Jennifer
Pepper, Luke Sides, and Luc Sokolowski skirted
the "picture makes a thousand words" platitude
and danced with the words themselves in a
group exhibit, a light discussion, at Art Corridor
II this spring.
Their use of word plays, linguistic tools, and
computer jargon made plenty of connections
across the verbal and visual worlds. From the
rarefied spheres of phonology and semantics
to the banal imagery of graphic design and
emoticons, these artists showed command of
the visual power inside words.
Sokolowski rearranges morphologic build-
ing blocks to invent his own words, such as
Opstacle, which was a starting place for two
large-scale paintings in the exhibit. A third,
wall-sized work in three panels, Curtainty,
Familinear, Ambigusual, was originally con-
ceived as separate paintings. On each canvas,
Sokolowski paints the invented word in cur-
sive with his dominant hand. Then he uses his
other hand to paint in loops that echo the pur-
poseful energy of the handwriting, yet hinge on
the cusp of deep, subconscious meaning and
utter emptiness. Sokolowski's invented words
emerge and disappear again in the masses of
paint around the canvas.
Sides explores multiple meanings of words in
three separate works that share the title Read
Neck. He employs the same seductive tools of
semiotics used by advertisers and their stable
of graphic designers, beginning with smoothly
applied, pleasing colors and clear wordmarks.
But the oversized silhouettes of a longneck beer
bottle or a four-string guitar infuse a specific
extraneous meaning. In another series, created
in relief, the slogans of popular, acid-relieving
medicines share meaning with the artist's defi-
nition. How Do You Spell Relief? sets the Rolaids
wordmark in a rich, mahogany plaque fit for a
corporate boardroom. What a Relief is a plenti-
ful parade of large tablets cast in white plaster.
In a series of untitled works that begin with
an e-mail smiley face, Pepper divides her large
canvases in two. Emoticons imbue new mean-
ing into punctuation marks. But through her
canvas divisions-such as a baby blue seg-
ment that nearly crowds out baby pink-Pepper
shows that other parts of human communica-
tion remain the same. For her wall-sized mixed
media work Chat Room, she mined old com-
puter keyboards for the individual keys and
inserted them into mouth-shaped loops of

Luc Sokolowski, Familinear, 2002
Oil on canvas
72 x 60 inches
black velveteen. As long chains of black lips
and white teeth, the loops chatted endlessly
over and on top of one another, and like much
of human communication never quite con-
nected to each other.
Feulmer offered a pair of diminutive mixed
media works on wood that connected to the
verbal theme on an abstract level. The pig-
ments of Untitled (Orange) and Untitled (Gold)
land on the wood's surface to react with one

Luke Sides, How Do You Spell Relief?, 2002
Mohagany
16 x 36 inches
another as visual events. In Untitled (His Words)
and Untitled (Pronouns), Feulmer ventures into
phonology with a pair of sound pieces, offered
up on disk players and headphones that would
be equally at home in a contemporary music
venue. The listener can allow the words, which
repeat in hypnotic rhythms, to drift down into
each other as sound events.
Ishaque connects her work to current events
with the series, Reading Between the Headlines.
She renders tableaulike pieces of handpainted
clay in earth tones with feminine shadows and
text transferred in screenprint. An installation,
Living Under the Shadows, haunted the viewer
with a dozen, slightly oversized yet elegant
human shadows screenprinted onto delicate
georgette and chiffon fabrics. The shadows
hung from the ceiling in a crowded mass, yet
moved in fragile waves with one another at the
slightest disturbance in the room. The arms of
the shadow figures gestured high and low in
front of Arabic text written in charcoal on the
wall behind. Even if known to the viewer, the
message was barely visible through the sense
of despair generated by the figures.

52 ARTL!ES Summer 2003

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