February 2016 | Page 14

February 2016 The Sound STC•Vol.2 Issue 02 Action & Reaction By Bart Gazzola The side lounge area at Rodman Hall Arts Centre is somewhat of a moribund space (the recent Deck The Halls gala challenged this with silvery wallpaper and disco balls). This is something that the current exhibition combats in a unique way, with bright yellow “slabs” and arrangements of artworks that provide splashes and spots of vitality. But, oddly for a (theoretically) visual space, its the words and phrases scattered about the room that enliven it the most. Visual Appropriations and Rewritings has been on display there since January 12. Asta McCann’s poetic declaration that “Our inert gaze is detatched yet intrusive” could be easily applied to Nicola Ciaramella’s Untitled (Abstract Taxonomy), with petite doll arms and the vaguely geographical fragment atop a hard edged diagonal of vibrant flatness. “We taste the ink of black and white and see the sound of the past, to be”: these words of Anjelika French’s mesh nicely with Melanie Prentice’s Untitled (Nurture), with its transparencies and flat play on monochromes. But French’s words hang on the wall under Faith Brown’s amorphic wintry purple blue washes, all tiny rectangulars with fine white torn borders. You’re invited to mix and match the words as you move around the space, as befits an exploration of what appropriation / rewriting can mean, or be. Not all the (very strong) writing is so literal. “The nuclear family is as nuclear a bomb as the American dr X[x