Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: I DO
@ Volume Gallery
1709 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60642
Opening Friday, March 3rd, from 5PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, April 22nd
Best known for her bold wall-painted Supergraphics of the 1960s, Solomon’s signature aesthetic uses black and vermillion line, shape, and sans-serif typography at architectural scale and in her inventive works on paper.
Intended and realized as both an exhibition and a book, I DO began with Solomon’s interest in playing with letter forms. Throughout the drawings she uses iteration, allowing the letters of phrases like “I DO,” “I DO U,” and “I DO C U” to break down and be rearranged. The book’s materiality comes through in painterly question marks, tangible edges of collaged sections of text, and scribbles of Wite-Out. Each page has a hand-drawn grid as a background. Instead of erasing this compositional foundation, Solomon leaves it to give a glimpse of the underlying structure. When installed together, the sequence of pieces reveals where she has expanded letters and punctuation across pages, letting ideas extend across the installation.
As in many of her books, Solomon’s autobiography finds its way into the work. On one page, she mentions her two marriages. She uses the theme of marriage and its declarative commitment, “I DO,” as a catalyst to play with the structure of the italic sans-serif typeface, the meaningful words evolving into abstraction. As Solomon says, her interest was in the letter forms, “and what people read into it is their own problem, you know?”
I DO will be on view at Volume Gallery through April 22, 2023.
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Tags: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Chicago, I DO, Volume Gallery, West Town
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