Samuel Jablon: Word:Play
Word made flesh. As much as been said, done and written about that exquisite (and often elusive) realm, the intersection of text and image - there is always room for a newcomer. And along comes Samuel Jablon. At once poet, painter and performance artist, while at the same time none of the above, Jablon pushes the envelope of this genre several steps further in his recent body of work, Word:Play 鈥� the atist鈥檚 debut solo at Freight+Volume. This new work cannot be easily categorized, boxed up and neatly wrapped. Jablon is first and foremost an inventor, a seeker, and an explorer. So the work he produces isn鈥檛 exactly poetry, painting or sculpture 鈥� it is a new, hybrid mix of all three disciplines. Like Piet Hein鈥檚 Grooks, Jim Harrison鈥檚 Ghazals, or Wendy White鈥檚 Tondos, Jablon鈥檚 poem/paintings perhaps need another name, a brand new definition.
To be sure, visual poems, or literary images, have been around as long as cave paintings, Egyptian tablets and medieval illuminated manuscripts. Much more recently, artists such as Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, On Kawara and Christopher Wool utilize text and narrative as the basis and driving force in their work. Samuel Jablon takes this legacy a step further in that he has created a way of seeing language in a new light 鈥� a light that shifts with the viewer鈥檚 experience and perception of the words, ultimately becoming a deconstruction of language and poetry in visual form. Jablon responds and riffs on paintings such as Wool鈥檚 Sell the House鈥ell the Kids and Ruscha鈥檚 Hollywood in his own works 鈥� including Lots of Loot, America Dreams, Say Something and Do it. But Jablon is doing something a bit different.
Samuel Jablon actually makes his words from scratch, fashioned out of mundane materials and sometimes almost nothing. The words he chooses - and in many instances the poetry - may have existed before, but the artist appropriates them, takes each individual letter and molds them carefully and lovingly into personal tableaus from a variety of materials at hand 鈥� sequins, mirrors, thick paint, tiles 鈥� and thereby makes them his own. The words mean something, or perhaps they mean nothing 鈥� but in the end it doesn鈥檛 matter, because they are beautiful. Like a seasoned speechwriter ghostwriting text for the artworld , Jablon weaves the words with a dazzling and mellifluous spin. He is affable, polite and good-natured and brilliant - in art as well as in life - and the words he chooses reflect that character. They exist easily on the surface but at the same time they also dig deep 鈥� they tease and flirt slyly with our imagination but they are also sincere and pure of heart.
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Word made flesh. As much as been said, done and written about that exquisite (and often elusive) realm, the intersection of text and image - there is always room for a newcomer. And along comes Samuel Jablon. At once poet, painter and performance artist, while at the same time none of the above, Jablon pushes the envelope of this genre several steps further in his recent body of work, Word:Play 鈥� the atist鈥檚 debut solo at Freight+Volume. This new work cannot be easily categorized, boxed up and neatly wrapped. Jablon is first and foremost an inventor, a seeker, and an explorer. So the work he produces isn鈥檛 exactly poetry, painting or sculpture 鈥� it is a new, hybrid mix of all three disciplines. Like Piet Hein鈥檚 Grooks, Jim Harrison鈥檚 Ghazals, or Wendy White鈥檚 Tondos, Jablon鈥檚 poem/paintings perhaps need another name, a brand new definition.
To be sure, visual poems, or literary images, have been around as long as cave paintings, Egyptian tablets and medieval illuminated manuscripts. Much more recently, artists such as Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, On Kawara and Christopher Wool utilize text and narrative as the basis and driving force in their work. Samuel Jablon takes this legacy a step further in that he has created a way of seeing language in a new light 鈥� a light that shifts with the viewer鈥檚 experience and perception of the words, ultimately becoming a deconstruction of language and poetry in visual form. Jablon responds and riffs on paintings such as Wool鈥檚 Sell the House鈥ell the Kids and Ruscha鈥檚 Hollywood in his own works 鈥� including Lots of Loot, America Dreams, Say Something and Do it. But Jablon is doing something a bit different.
Samuel Jablon actually makes his words from scratch, fashioned out of mundane materials and sometimes almost nothing. The words he chooses - and in many instances the poetry - may have existed before, but the artist appropriates them, takes each individual letter and molds them carefully and lovingly into personal tableaus from a variety of materials at hand 鈥� sequins, mirrors, thick paint, tiles 鈥� and thereby makes them his own. The words mean something, or perhaps they mean nothing 鈥� but in the end it doesn鈥檛 matter, because they are beautiful. Like a seasoned speechwriter ghostwriting text for the artworld , Jablon weaves the words with a dazzling and mellifluous spin. He is affable, polite and good-natured and brilliant - in art as well as in life - and the words he chooses reflect that character. They exist easily on the surface but at the same time they also dig deep 鈥� they tease and flirt slyly with our imagination but they are also sincere and pure of heart.
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