GROUP EXHIBITION PRESS DOSSIER · NEW HAVEN · 2006
TEXTURE
Texture was a text-in-art show: twenty-two artists who “have incorporated text with composition to address complicated ideas in personal ways,” hung at the Arts + Literature Laboratory in New Haven in the late summer of 2006. Barbara’s entry was Tower of Babel, a tall acrylic-on-wood panel built entirely of phrases in the languages she heard around her in Los Angeles.
The record is the review. Judy Birke, writing for the New Haven Register, was hard on the show as a whole—“too often the works… fail to form a really satisfying union between concept and image”—and picked out six that succeeded. Tower of Babel was one of them. Beside the review sits Barbara’s own two-paragraph statement on the painting, the only text she is known to have written about it.
THE VENUE
Arts + Literature Laboratory
ALL, an artist-run gallery and literary space in New Haven, Connecticut. Texture drew twenty-two artists from across the country.
THE DATES
September 2006
The review ran on September 9, 2006, with the show “current.” Opening and closing dates have not surfaced; her résumé records the exhibition as 2006.
THE WORK
Tower of Babel
Acrylic on wood, 96 × 48 inches. Phrases in many languages, painted as the structure of the tower itself. The review’s six chosen works ranged from a room-size video of a typewriter to a white-on-white Braille embossing; hers was the only painting among them.
WORKS FEATURED
Tower of Babel, acrylic on wood, 96 × 48 in.
ARTIST STATEMENT
What the critic saw
As a painter who is legally blind, I’ve become less influenced by what I “see” and more inspired by what I hear, remember and imagine.
“Tower of Babel” is an example of my language-inspired painting. The text becomes the image. In this case the text is composed of random phrases from the many different languages I hear living in a 21st Century urban center like Los Angeles.
“Barbara Romain Peditto’s ‘Tower of Babel’ also uses text as the physical element that becomes the image, the random phrases from different languages that make up the painted tower conveying a primitive energy and rawness.”
— Judy Birke, “Message sometimes lost in medium in ALL’s ‘Texture’,” New Haven Register, September 9, 2006 (her name as the paper printed it)
THE PRESS RECORD · 2006
What was written, printed and photographed
Filter by kind. Each box opens its source; grey boxes are held in the Estate archive and open on request.