Churner and Churner presents a group exhibition curated by Michael Wilson. “Written by Snakes” features work by four Brooklyn-based artists— Annette Weherhahn, Hanna Sandin, Jude Broughan, and Stephen Nguyen—who use systems of visual and verbal language that are interrupted, manipulated, and remade en route to new modes and forms. At issue is the possibility—or impossibility—of true communication. Annette Weherhahn’s augmented prints are based around conversational phrases that are partially or wholly obscured by gestural markma... Read more

Churner and Churner presents a group exhibition curated by Michael Wilson. “Written by Snakes” features work by four Brooklyn-based artists— Annette Weherhahn, Hanna Sandin, Jude Broughan, and Stephen Nguyen—who use systems of visual and verbal language that are interrupted, manipulated, and remade en route to new modes and forms. At issue is the possibility—or impossibility—of true communication.

Annette Weherhahn’s augmented prints are based around conversational phrases that are partially or wholly obscured by gestural markmaking and layers of intense color. Using simple homemade stencils and a basic silkscreen technique, Weherhahn combines pattern and texture to suggest the ambiguity of even the most outwardly simple phrase.

Hanna Sandin’s elegant mobiles reference syntactical structures by formally evoking children’s toys designed to facilitate cognitive development. They suggest a language stripped of its expected meaning and reduced to abstracted material components, as everyday objects are flattened and reordered into a fragmented visual grammar.

Jude Broughan’s mixed-media works combine the languages of photography, painting, printmaking, and collage. She uses materials such as vinyl, gels, and vintage paper to amplify one material’s voice one moment and drown it out the next. Here, Broughan juxtaposes photographs with constructed elements to elicit a feeling of immediacy, weaving a visual essay around perceptions of everyday life.

Stephen Nguyen’s paintings concentrate on isolating the act of looking as a way to understand the means by which we read visual information in a given space. Alternating between illusionism and the use of visual traces of past actions, he brings representation into the realm of architecture by applying paint to both canvases and interior walls, and by converting solid objects into monochrome images of themselves.