Fieldwork Projects: Play on Words
Opening Reception: Fri. Jan. 23, 5–8 p.m.
Play on Words features a sprawling, text-based wall collage by students enrolled in Javier Robelo’s Print for Nonmajors course. Composed of risograph prints, the installation gathers text fragments drawn from books, signs, flyers, and other printed matter into a poetic field of collaborative meaning-making.
The exhibition meditates on language as a fluid process in which knowledge and meaning are generated through encounters between writer and reader. Words, phrases, and sentences fracture and reassemble across the wall, inviting viewers to navigate varying degrees of legibility. The text, reimagined and recontextualized through the risograph and installation processes, insists on the written word as something that is living, handled, and continually transformed. In the back room, a video projection extends the installation, looping the source images to further unsettle fixed readings.
Drawing inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 short story, The Library of Babel, which describes a world in which all possible books exist, and meaning is both everywhere and elusive, Play on Words positions artists and viewers as active participants in the future of language, foregrounding the power of words to make, and remake, our lived worlds.