‘Language as Shapes’, a collaborative installation by Karl Erickson and Andrew Falkowski, uses language to discover the limits of where sense and meaning evolve, and, more appropriately, devolve.

This show is an installation consisting of looping 3D animated videos, a series of small framed text collages and Tondos – circle paintings made from handmade and assembled plaster cast chains mounted onto the wall.

In ‘Language as Shapes’ Erickson and Falkowski push semiotics towards a poetically absurd kind of psychedelia. Through different materials, both explore how the form of letters and words morphs language into nonsensical loops. Erickson and Falkowski push language into a glossolalia for our hyper-specific times, uttering logically expressed nonsense wedged between the semiotic and the abstract. ‘Language as Shapes’ devolves into formal properties in order to play with the epistemological threshold of language as a communicative device. Erickson’s video series are part of an absurdist take on educational programming for children, from Sesame Street to algorithmically produced animations on Youtube. This video series shows how communication is not a fixed, efficient form. Rather, it is malleable, illogical, and physical. These animations find some way of getting an educational lesson mostly, but not entirely, wrong. For instance, a 3d animated puppet ‘monster’ is chewing on the letter R, while making the repeated “arr-arr-arrr” growling sound. Letters fall, spelling the word “are,” confusing the matter of the letter “R”, sliding from ‘meaning’, to sound, to shape. It’s in the slippage between different types of address that complicate the ways in which we transmit and interpret meaning.

Like Erickson’s videos, Falkowski’s collages use grammar school esthetics to create a graphic palimpsest of ransom note collages. Cosmic Cats, coloring book pages, dot-to-dot pages, glitter stickers and letters cut from labels, junk mail, and candy wrappers are filled out improvisationally, lending themselves to the same kind of willful misinterpretation for the sake of discovery as Erickson’s videos. Like how Erickson’s video loops use of language and educational practices, Falkowski’s Tondos confound the conventional use of chains as an imposing barrier. Delicate, handmade, swirly pigmented cast plaster chain links are painstakingly cut and assembled by hand, joined together to revolve endlessly like an Orobouros always circling and creating a confounding recursive perimeter that is less of a protective barrier and more like a narrow liminal space between an inside and outside, without a clear beginning or end.

Thinking of language as a shape, a sound, a composition and a somatic utterance, Erickson and Falkowski experiment with the various ways we go through the improbable task of translating private impulses into messages for a world of others. Their works change the pace of reading and comprehension, creating a slippage in presumed knowledge and expectations, exposing the intrinsic frailty of communication. Erickson’s and Falkowski’s work rejoices in the malleability of meaning in language. The goal is to put the viewer in a state of presentness and to take on a state of beginner’s mind.