James Castle / Walker Evans, Knoedler & Company, New York - Word-play, Signs and Symbols

James Castle / Walker Evans: Word-play, Signs and Symbols
Knoedler & Company, New York
May 4 – August 11, 2006

Knoedler & Company presents James Castle/Walker Evans: Word-play, Signs and Symbols. This exhibition focuses on James Castle’s use of words and letters, numbers, signs, and symbols, and juxtaposes this varied body of work—which includes collages, drawings, and handmade books, as well as mixed media works in color—with late Polaroids by Walker Evans.

James Castle’s use of language was limited, and his degree of literacy has never clearly been determined, however a fascination with text, pictograph, and symbol is found throughout his work, marked not only by “its craft, warmth of feeling, and variety,” but also by its “formally sophisticated relationship to the sign culture of products and advertising, as well as its obsession with the building blocks of language: letters, sets, and sequential order and disarray.” James Castle’s detailed attention to text and symbol extends to lists, ledgers, and calendars—ordered collections of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and pictographs, which he often collected into hand-sewn books. Sometimes he cut or tore individual letters, words, phrases, and headlines from printed matter, dissecting each letter into minute jigsaw-puzzle like pieces which he then recombined and reassembled, as in Untitled (Fire Sale). More often, we discover that apparent “found” texts and symbols are actually beautifully rendered drawings.

While the exhibition’s primary focus is the work of James Castle (1900-1977), it also present a parallel selections of Polaroids by Walker Evans (1903-1975) on loan from the Collections of Martin Z. Margulies, Miami. Walker Evans made 2,650 Polaroids during the years 1973 and 74, on the themes of vernacular architecture, domestic interiors, portraiture, and signage—including roadside and storefront signs, and traffic markings and arrows. Like James Castle, Walker Evans often used fragments of signs and groupings of letters as decontextualized graphic forms. This thematic juxtaposition of Castle and Evans shows James Castle engaged by concerns that were very much those of mainstream modernism.

James Castle/Walker Evans: Word-play, Signs and Symbols marks Knoedler’s third exhibition devoted to the work of James Castle, presented in collaboration with J Crist Gallery of Boise, Idaho. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Stephen Westfall (all above quotations are taken from the catalogue essay).

KNOEDLER & COMPANY
19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
www.knoedlergallery.com