Visual art and language. Two forms of communication that don’t necessarily need each other, but have been intertwined in a new exhibit given by the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) at its gallery in DUMBO.

The show, entitled Clamoring to Become Visible, is curated by Christine Spangler and showcases the work of 14 artists. The exhibit investigates how the written word interacts with and sometimes replaces the visual aesthetic.

Courtney Wendroff, BAC Gallery coordinator chose Spangler’s show because she was intrigued to see the way artists would combine text and visual art. “I thought it would be interesting to see different ways artists use text in their work. It’s not always to obvious that there is text in the work,� she said.

“I had the idea to do a text-based show to work off the idea that your involvement with text is something that is very intimate and at times can be very different than your relationship with the visual arts alone,� Spangler said. “I got to go through a lot of wonderful submissions.�

Of these submissions, she “tried to focus on some of the more hand-crafted, more intimate, more personal types of works... what’s really interesting about a lot of these is it’s not blatant use of text, it’s not a very obvious use of text.�

One such artist who created work through an intimate process was Meg Hitchcock. Her works in the show, Bhagavad Gita from the Koran and Heart Sutra from the Bible Matthew 5, were made of holy texts that were cut and pieced together to make a completely different holy text.

With Heart Sutra from the Bible Matthew 5 she took a chapter from the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament of the Bible and transformed it to a Buddhist prayer. In the other, she took words from the Hindu tradition and transcribed them to make a text from the Muslim tradition.

“I’m taking one spiritual tradition and I’m creating a holy text from another spiritual tradition,� she said. “The idea is sort of a leveling of all holy traditions.�

An artist who had a different take on the text concept was Michelle Provenzano, whose work is very free form and organic. She describes her drawings, which are a mixture of animals and letters, as “self forming and improvisational,� as if one part leads to another. “It’s kind of a meditation where I think about encounters and ways people interact.�

Inge Hoonte took the concept of words more literally. She presented a fragmented story juxtaposed with photographs. Someone's Always Missing Somewhere examines the experiences people have with each other and had “this general thought of having a map that’s integrated in your body and your mind of all the experiences you have with other people. So every time you meet another person you sort of store it somewhere in your body.�

Jung Eun Park from Korea, made her art out of the experience she had moving to the United States and being away from her mother for the first time. “The only chance I could talk with her was on the phone,� she said. “It was so hard to communicate with each other on the phone. There were a lot of words that I couldn’t tell her.�

So she wrote her mother letters, and embroidered one of these letters on a handkerchief to produce the work entitled Letter to Mother. However, it can’t actually be read because it is hung backwards.

Another of the artists, Jen May, made a political statement with her piece, but it’s not the one she intended it to be. Her work is multi-colored pipe cleaners strung up to make the phrase “I Don't Care How We Get It But We'll Get It Someday.�

“I was thinking about it as a feminist piece. I made it a few years ago actually and then when I was hanging it up, it was weird because I kept thinking about Obama,� she explained. “I feel like after he was elected it almost seems like something else.�

As for the show as a whole, Wendroff said, “It’s really interesting, the techniques, and how artists can really do so many things and use language to keep it all interesting and relevant.�

Clamoring to Become Visible will be at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery through June 26. Other artists with work in the exhibit are Golnar Adili, Lauren Culbreth, Luke Gilford, Lisa Kellner, Reuben Lorch-Miller, Nesta Mayo, Daniel Peterson, German Tagle and Matt Wycoff.

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