Words for Rank

There is a journey between the source image and the target image in the glitch. From the surface to the bottom. From what is rationally structured to what is its original code. In Rank, Kristine Snodgrass places side-by-side visual works and poetic writings that share the same root: a subversive intention with respect to the abused and crystallized languages of everyday communication and power, in search of what is subterranean, corporeal, germinal. "Syllables of mortal flesh," she writes. A gesture - in images and words - almost physical and performative, which demystifies the apparent and reveals the substantial. An act, which becomes aesthetic, of deconstruction and re-creation through the "error" caused in the image file on the one hand and in the structure of the written text on the other. The result, on the visual side, is different works in which the signification is entrusted to the constituent elements of color (phosphorescent and iridescent or transparent with suggestions of watercolor, inked and scratched or pasty, intensely sampled in the drafting of blacks and blues or fiery red), of the line (vertical, horizontal, or intertwined), of the sign (thick as erasures or minute as germinations, with words or syllables as resistance to slipping), of the composition (orthogonal, or specular, geometrically full-bodied or extremely fragmented). On the writing side, the "error," consisting of the vital and magmatic automatism of the flow of consciousness, deconstructs the language of rational communication, producing texts in which the different levels of experience collide, provoking sparks meaning, flashes, and illuminations. On both sides, closely connected, the heuristic encounter between author and user in search of a possible lost communication takes place. The error, the glitch (with what it implies of chance and chaos), the imperfection, forcefully brings back the uncontrolled complexity of life into the artificial simplification of the constituted order, that singular unrepeatable uniqueness capable of producing its own "native sound": "The ensuing light is a spirit departed from blood." —Cinzia Farina

There are faults in human systems. Glitches if you like. They may be slips in relationships, errors in decisions, miscalculations, or just plain rank and file disturbances that swing us on uncontrolled zip lines through emotional jungles without a machete. Places, faces, and text are flattened into technologically veiled images. Emotions are flat-lined, yet glaring color makes us all too aware of the impossibility of remaining in a no-mans-land of unfeeling. Kristine exposes her insides - on the outside, and the mediation by machine cannot hide an inner turmoil or a heart that longs to escape the confines of imposed passions. Words used in the art of digitally produced images are terms such as expose, bleed, resolution, tracing, crop, perspective, layer – all these expressions apply to the artist behind these melded images and text, who re-presents in a circuitous format some of the greatest questions of all – is THIS what it feels like to be human? Will today always feel like THIS? Stretched, duplicated, misunderstood, colored in, erased out, redefined. Overexposed, double exposure, repeat. Just Exposed. Cropped, glaring, and re-framed, Kristine tells us in intimate terms that the inner journeys she traverses are universal yet personal, all unique yet belonging to a common collective. We were, never so different after all - you, and you and I. —Cheryl Penn