Wayward Signs

In Wayward Signs, artist-writers Steffani Jemison and Renee Gladman move toward and linger with the limits, edges, and excesses of language. With a keen attention to drawing—and its formal relationship to writing—the two artists seek out the unruly, indeterminate places where language and visuality meet and disrupt one another. The conceptual foundations of the exhibition emerge from and with the generative pressures which black aesthetics bears upon language, writing, and semiotics: through Gladman and Jemison’s work, Wayward Signs aims to illuminate how black commitments to improvisation, errantry, and indeterminacy erupt and interrupt the regulative constraints of linguistics, grammar, and sense-making. 

Where does black visuality meet and transgress the boundaries of language? How might it engender approaches to language commensurate with the liberatory political and discursive conceits of blackness? What does it afford to those dimensions of blackness and black history that refuse to be described, narrated, or recounted in words? In the works on view, Gladman and Jemison negotiate these questions by prying open and playing with the structure of language, troubling the putatively stable order of meaning therein. Calligraphic lines, glyphs, and strokes evoke and appear like writing but can’t actually be read. The visual form of language breaks; signifiers fall apart; writing and words give way to indeterminate, incoherent, and inscrutable forms. Thus emerge semiotic gestures that flee from the epistemic encumbrances of rationality, interpretability, and linguistic representation. For Jemison and Gladman, these interventions in language invoke various black histories of musical improvisation, renegade spatial imaginaries, and encoded, clandestine systems of communication. 

Wayward Signs takes its title from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which offers a sketch of the wayward as “the unregulated movement of drifting and wanderings; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion.” With these words as its point of departure, Wayward Signs asks—through Gladman and Jemison’s work—how the ungovernable force of black life and aesthetics open up and overturn the ground of language, moving beyond any and all discursive enclosures.  

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