Regina Rex - 221 Madison St. New York, NY 10002

Opening reception: Saturday, January 8th, 6-9pm

Sarah Butler, Josh Faught, David Humphrey, Kristen Kee, Mary Reid Kelley,
Lucy Kim, Leeza Meksin, Dona Nelson, Gil Rocha, Rebecca Shore and Jackie Tileston

Performance by Mira Stroika at Tandem at 10pm
Texture is the arrangement, pattern, or feel of constituent parts: a rough surface comprised of granules, thread woven into fabric, musical notes swirling in densities of sounds. Text is letters shuffled into words shuffled into meaningful passages - visual communication representing speech, our guttural utterances in the form of perceptible marks on a surface. Speech is formed by syllables that are constructed in the body and emitted through the mouth, where hard and soft sounds with wavering intonation are filtered through the acoustic mechanism of the throat, and are shaped by the tongue and lips. Texture and text originate from the Indo-European word "teks" meaning to weave, to fabricate. It is a word for a craftsperson, one who builds, one who manipulates an accumulation of small units into something useful, something to trade, something symbolic.

Artists often play with these ideas. They jiggle symbols into alternately meaningful and confusing relationships, build patterns from distinct marks, and create objects that are meant to have special value. Artworks, like writing, are graphic and reference both words and images. And the evolution of writing is linked to pictures, as the earliest forms of written communication are depictions of animals in caves, pigmented rubbings and scratches on dark stone walls that say "I was here, I saw this, I have feelings about this thing I saw."

-Jennifer Coates