Shatter / Chatter: Rosaire Appel
Rosaire Appel produced her first artists’ books and asemic texts in the 1990s after decades of working in painting, photography, and literature. Since then, her practice has grown to encompass abstract comics, unconventional sound scores, and books that emerge from diagrammatic, cartographic, calligraphic, appropriative, and redactive techniques. Shatter / Chatter, an exhibition curated by Nicole Kaack, traces through-lines within the artist’s work across media and places her within a matrix of visual, literary, and sonic traditions.
The exhibition takes shape in two parts. Drawing its title from transiT, an experimental novel that Appel wrote in 1993, Shatter emphasizes the interdisciplinarity of the artist’s practice through a historical survey of her artist books, structuralist writing, and photography. Organized thematically around forms recurrent in her work—including objective writing, non-narrative comics, and experimental notations of sound—this section considers the entanglement of looking, listening, and reading.
Chatter picks up this thread in the present, creating a new, deconstructed artist book from recent drawings. Chosen by Appel and the curator in turn, the pages of this exploded book form a wordless conversation of visual correspondences—rhyming, for example, the circling shadow of a spring with a meandering doodle or the outline of a conical prism—and call out enduring motifs that arise across disparate media.
