Text Me presented artworks on the theme of messaging. Curator, Glen Walls, assembled a group that included himself, four artists who regularly work with text—Rose Nolan, Sanné Mestrom, Gabrielle de Vietri and Danielle Freakley—together with the design duo Pandarosa.
The works incorporated the motif of text, or oblique references to it, across various technologies of expression not restricted to the typographic form. Although the artists showed an awareness of the history of concrete poetry, conceptual art and particularly the Art & Language movement, they avoided rehashing any of the old concerns of structural linguistics about the systematic features inherent in language’s operation.
The exhibition did not focus on the structures of language per se but its instrumentality in building relationships or communities. By foregrounding the social functions of language and privileging individual utterances, the exhibition closely examined various intimacies created by speech and writing. Certain of the artists achieved this by inserting themselves into the work, or by using first-person to second-person speech, as if to whisper to the viewer, this is about you and me. Others created this intimacy by expressing personal vulnerability. These various strategies seemed to run the spectrum bounded by the two extremes of what the imperative Text me can signify: on the one hand a breezy sign off meaning let’s talk and on the other a neediness of the you never write, you never call…variety.
Sanné Mestrom has become known for large-scale painted wall texts of quasi biblical messages rendered with dizzying spatial illusions. By contrast, in Text Me she presented a series of large black and white images that were so degraded they appeared to be copies of copies. They depicted a