Kay Rosen: Prints and Drawings

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Kay Rosen: Prints and Drawings, on view in the back galleries from December 14, 2023 through February 3, 2024. This solo exhibition features a selection of Rosen’s works on paper along with a new silkscreen print edition. 

Since the 1970s, Kay Rosen has been exploring the formal and ontological functions of language as a wellspring of artistic potential. Her unique applications of scale, color, design, and typography shift familiar interpretations of everyday words and phrases, reveling in the mutability of text and image. Language, for Rosen, is seen as “found material,” which can be enabled and activated through minimal intervention on the part of the artist. Wit and levity are integral to the tone of her “verbal shortcuts,” provoking incisive and enduring perspectives on contemporary social and political issues. 

Rosen’s new silkscreen print edition, entitled SOUNDTRACK (2023), references an earlier series of work from the 1990s, which similarly employed the compositional strategy of blacked-out text. In this new print, three lines of text displayed across six panels, each with a specific combination of concealed and uncovered letters. The complete message, revealed in the final panel, has been successively “remixed” into six unique conceptual readings. The six unique graphical arrangements evoke multiple associations and emotions, such as the initial “discovery” of the hidden words, the starting and stopping of a music track, a pulsing four-on-the-floor beat, and the revelatory joy and communion that defines disco culture. These significations draw thematic resonance from the 2007 essay “Dance Dance Revolution: Disco as a Clarion Call to Aspiration” by writer and friend of the artist David Scott. As Rosen’s SOUNDTRACK demonstrates, suppression and obfuscation are futile; the language of disco, and its universal spirit, persists. 

An interview between Rosen and writer and curator Terry R. Myers will be published in the December-January issue of The Brooklyn Rail, and feature a discussion of SOUNDTRACK within the context of Rosen’s larger oeuvre and current practice.