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Ruth Laxson at Marcia Wood - Atlanta

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Cathy Byrd

Ruth Laxson considers her work "an attempt to restore some of the texture and grain of life being flattened by cyberspace." Her exhibition "<I>Visual Poetry / Paintings and Drawings<P>" explored both the concrete and abstract potential of handwritten text on canvas and paper, variously mixing the mediums of ink, graphite, watercolor, collage, chine colle, etching and typesetting. The works' tiny, spidery letters and fine, meandering lines dilate into patterns, objects, figures and elements of nature while retaining their verbal power to analyze and critique.

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Since the 1980s, Laxson has been making meticulous artist's books with a hand letterpress in her backyard studio. Her automatic writing and concrete poetry merge text and image in an ongoing idiosyncratic commentary on contemporary life. New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Tate in London, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University, among others, have collected her limited editions.

In this show's more recent body of work, nets, numbers, parenthetical expressions, maps, musical notations and sometimes squiggly tadpoles or sperm squirm their way through the pictorial space. Occasionally, minimalist stick figures--thin-armed, block-bodied creatures--deliver the work's linguistic punch. In their syncopated discourse, they resemble Beat poets: "You cyborg / standing / there in / your tight / skin pack--/ age / you're (really) a / teeming core of chaos" (Cyborg, 2002).

Laxson speaks her mind, pricking the viewer's conscience with art that must be read past its formal whimsy. Being (2001), a drawing in which the hands of a puppeteer manipulate an egg's nucleus, laments how genetic science now toys with life. In the emptiness around the simple biological unit of Cell (2001), sits a cautionary note: "every day we borrow the air / water / time / to make do in the / middle of chaos."

But Laxson's strongest statement leapt off the paper of Wish (2002) into a spoken-word performance in the gallery, when poet/critic Jerry Cullum intoned, "sometimes I wish / art could just come right out / like war does and / say Look You SOB / Why don't you do right--like some / other men do."

Ruth Laxson at Marcia Wood - Atlanta

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Cathy Byrd

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