The Language Of Objects: New Works By Jane Birdsall-Lander And Jo Stealey

Organized in conjunction with the citywide Innovations in Textiles 8 celebration, this exhibition features work by sculptors Jane Birdsall-Lander and Jo Stealey. The artists each use language as a conceptual catalyst well as a textural and/or a contextual component to speak to fundamental human issues of communication and existence in their work.
Text becomes image and image becomes narrative in Birdsall-Lander's sculptures. Using the origin of language as a source, sculptor and poet Birdsall-Lander creates wall pieces that combine used and abandoned tools with industrial waxed linen to make three dimensional hybrid forms that function separately as visual poems and, taken together, comprise an idiosyncratic sign system that she has titled Bound Alphabet. Stealey's work touches upon both the mundane and the sublime. In her cast paper rocks, trees and word totems created from mulberry pulp she underscores how objects and words mediate our experience of the world.