PhonoMorphoIdiot at ANTI-AESTHETIC
Eugene Contemporary Art is proud to present PhonoMorphoIdiot, an exhibition of work by Andrew C. Lorish, Stephanie Parnes, Alyson Provax, Madeline Maszk, and Courtney Stubbert.
- phono: sound, voice
- morpho: form, shape
- idiot: a stupid person
“after all these years the true roots of my fascination with language remain the same as on that day on a Philadelphia sidewalk when I lost my innocence: that anything I write or say in this language can be said in about six thousand other ways, with completely different words and with grammars so different that they can almost strain the credulity of the outsider.”
– John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language
“Your phone’s predictive text and auto-correct Markov chains update themselves as you type, training themselves on what you write. That’s why if you make a typo, it may haunt you for quite some time.”
― Janelle Shane, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place
PhonoMorphoIdiot is a group exhibition that considers the uncertainties and absurdities of our verbal, written, and text-based communication. We exist between a shared understanding and the sensory and cultural edges of language which are shaped by everything from bodily states, fantasies and in-group signaling, to predictive text, targeted advertising and character limits. Whether through image-making, objects or sound, the artists in this show engage with language’s flexibility – often to its breaking point. Channels become convoluted, noise increases, the signal is misdirected or lost. By staying with these failures and frolicking in their wreckage, we may stumble upon alternative modes of signifying and connecting to one another.
PhonoMorphoIdiot will be on view at ANTI-AESTHETIC, 245 W 8th Ave, Eugene, OR, from April 16th through May 29th, 2022, with open hours on Saturdays and Sundays, 12–4pm.
The opening reception will take place on Friday April 15, 6–9pm.
About the artists in the show
Andrew C.M. Lorish was born in Eugene, Oregon. He studied at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Pacific Northwest College of Art where, in 2013, he received his MFA in Visual Studies. Selected exhibitions include Albatross Gallery in Portland, False Front in Portland, North Bank Gallery in Vancouver, Liberty Arts Center in Yreka, California, Sullivan Gallery and Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago, Rockerill in Charleroi Belgium, and dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. He is a founding member of the art collective Danger Punch. His work references the body, invented impractical machines, improvisational music, futuristic architecture, ritualistic masks, alien glyphs, unseen primitive ruins, coded scripts and the repetitious syncopated rhythm of gestural mark making. He currently is the Program Coordinator of the Art Media and Technology Department at OSU-Cascades on Bend, Oregon.
Alyson Provax lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in loneliness, uncertainty, memory, and the other small but powerful specifics of living in our times. Her formal training is as a printmaker and she works in letterpress. Her work has been described as “printmaking disinterested in the perfection based traditions that exist as a form of exclusion.” Within those experimental uses of traditional techniques she often uses the potential for repetition as a drawing tool, creates original works by manipulating the printed image, or uses physical printed pieces as stills for animation, reproductions into books, blankets, posters, stickers, and billboards.
She has shown regionally at Archer Gallery, Upfor Gallery, Agenda, Carnation Contemporary, LxWxH/Bridge Productions, Well Well Projects and the Whatcom Museum, nationally at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Montalvo Arts Center in California, and internationally at the Blueproject Foundation in Barcelona.
Her work appeared in articles about artists’ responses to the 2016 election in New York Magazine, Newsweek and ArtSlant. Her work has been published in Poetry Northwest, The Buckman Journal, and Eleven Eleven, and her first book was published by Volumes Volumes in 2019. She has shown temporary public art installations in San Jose in 2020 as part of Montalvo Arts Center’s ‘lone some’, in Portland in 2019 as ‘something nameless’ and Seattle in 2018, as part of Vignettes and Gramma’s project ‘a lone’.
Stephanie Parnes is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from Columbus, Ohio. She studied psychology at Ohio Wesleyan University and studio art at Columbus College of Art and Design. She moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2015 where she earned her MFA in Art from the University of Oregon School of Art and Design in 2019. She currently lives in Bend, Oregon and serves as Associate Faculty of Art at Oregon State University-Cascades.
Mady Maszk was born and raised in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Oregon in 2020. She currently lives and works in Eugene, OR with her partner, a fly fishing guide, and her lucky black cat.
Courtney Stubbert is an artist, musician, and designer living in Eugene, Oregon. He received his BA in Art History from the University of Oregon in 2007, and an AA in Visual Communication from the Art Institute of Seattle in 1996. Professionally he’s done everything from making pizzas to teaching karate to little kids. He even toured as a drummer. He founded Eugene Contemporary Art in 2011, and pays the bills as a UX Designer working in the federal and nonprofit sector. His best work is raising his 3 kids with his wife Kari.