Group Show:
Code Word Safe
FOCA Curator Lab

CODE WORD SAFE features works by artists: Oscar David Alvarez, Alexandra Grant, Kyla Hansen, David Karwan, Erica Ryan Stallones and Josh Paul Thomas. A catalogue, designed by David Karwan, will accompany the exhibition and include an essay by Clifford Eberly, and a Safety Senses Q & A with the artists introduced by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick.

Code Word Safe is an exhibition that brings together six Los Angeles based artists who use text, symbols and mixed media in their art works and performances to communicate social, political and personal messages that are spoken, painted, sewn and graphically produced.

The title, Code Word Safe , relates to the idea that art can manifest in physical, mental and public spaces offering safe means for viewers to learn and enrich their lives powerfully and constructively.

Under the study of semantics, the sub category pragmatics identifies words and language understood through context. The artists in Code Word Safe use pragmatics in different forms to facture creative and new paradigms of communicating through visual and spoken revelations. Oscar David Alvarez uses performance and sculpture to bring his contemporary messages of societal economic disconnects to life. His most recent installation and performance, Gridded, included a drywall skyscraper, collapsed park tower and origami cubes as proxies for new rooms in future condo buildings in downtown L.A. From within the structure, Alvarez sampled his voice over a live feed mimicking banal descriptions of condo listings meant to entice a financially adept set of demographic. Alvarez also invites viewer participation to gain access to a deeper understanding of a connective cognition of his message of social disconnect.

In her current series, Alexandra Grant mirrors, masks, rubs and camouflages slogans like, “I was born to love not to hate” into her paintings. Reminiscent of the striped patterns painted on British Dazzle Ships of World War I, to disrupt the enemy’s speed and distance calculations, Grant uses the patterns to develop depth and contrast for her inspiring phrases to weave, extend outward into and below foreground space.

As a sculptor and painter, Kyla Hansen cuts and assembles fabrics, casts and molds materials to elongate and reform texts that when spoken or thought force the viewer to fill in the blanks or continue the title of the work into a sentence. For example, the title Now, Now has a multitude of meanings depending on who is speaking and what context. It could be spoken to calm someone down or in sarcastic condescension creating a power structure between speaker and recipient. The text in the works are either obvious or elusive which keeps the viewer present and ultimately creates a sense of wonder and a humorous vernacular central to Kyla’s practice. Arranging words and letters in different size, symbolic and puzzle configurations, David Karwan’s graphic wall applications require visual deciphering and spatial recognition to decode the intimate quips and puns. A master of onomatopoeia, Karwan brings a personal history to his universal adages.

For her ongoing project STAR DECK Academy , Erica Ryan Stallones has researched symbols in astrology to create visual signifiers through color, shape and movement. The new watercolor paintings shown here also represent visual maps of the moon and astrological events that once decoded, describe specific solar system activity as experienced by the artist. Since astrology is time based it is also tied to language. As the writer Peter Hoeg explained, “Time is a sphere made up of language, colors, smells, senses, and sounds, a sphere in which you and the world coexist.”

John Paul Thomas’ graphic and provocative images are joined by vulnerable and confounding word puzzles that contrast with the hyper charged beastly and exhibitionist characters. A double take looped effect occurs while trying to make the relational connections between the pyramidal puzzles and the sexually charged scenes.

In our contemporary society, written and spoken language is analyzed faster and with the utmost scrutiny. As a group, the artists in Code Word Safe are different in their approach to issuing their messages through text and language. Through this exhibition the artists’ works will promote visual and textual connections that excite and inspire viewers to draw new conclusions through language and context.