The function of language both written and spoken is an automatic and thus often invisible process. As Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct, “Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other’s minds.”

Utilizing everything from pidgin to academic jargon to cocktail chatter, each artwork in Glossolalia has to be approached with a fresh eye, <insert idiom> as the artist may be attempting to invent a new language, commenting on or refusing to participate in an existing mode of speech, or exploring the creative possibilities of nonsensical tones or marks. Many artists are working in a language that is not their mother tongue, or working simultaneously in several languages. The significance of wordplay to radical political movements worldwide, like the religious/scientific phenomenon of “speaking in tongues,” are interpreted differently depending on one’s perspective.

Perhaps only visual artists can approach language this freely. Some examples:

The Gallery’s front window has been filled with 4,000 hand-cut vellum letters: the entire text of Gallery Aferro’s call for submissions, and the artist’s response to the call. Two monitors run a code that gives displayed words a kind of nervous system that responds to sound. Responding to ambient noise or the speech of the viewer, the letters deform until they are both illegible and expressive. A man writes calligraphy in five different languages with an ink dipped beef tongue held in his mouth. A man walks into a bar, and stoppeth one of three…

You are reading this text, interpreting it, and judging it.

For more information (monolingual), please contact Emma Wilcox at 646 220 3772 ewilcox@aferro.org

Glossolalia: Speaking in a language that one does not understand. .
Uttering a series of sounds that resemble language, but are not.
A state of grace.

Aferro: (Portuguese, idiomatic) Bound or chained to an insane idea, or an idea that is difficult to achieve."