ROUGH LANGUAGE
To be quite honest, when this exhibition opened in February at the Hexagon Space, the press releases didn’t entirely articulate what to expect. Billed as somewhat of an exploration of DIY identity branding,
—the two-person T-shirt exhibition of Emily Burtner and Double Dagger’s/Post Typography’s Nolen Strals (an occasional
City Paper
contributing illustrator)—read a little bit rigid on the page, as if the show was going to explore the visual language of the DIY T-shirt with bloodless theory.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Rough Language
remembers that American punk sometimes possessed an irreverent, often immature and puerile sense of humor and insolently overboard superciliousness often found in young people. (Side thought: Do you think if maybe the young men in Odd Future played guitars and sang instead of making beat-oriented music and rapping that everybody would recognize it as the pretty ordinary American punk band that it is?) Burtner uses safety pins and fabric to turn T-shirts into a geometric alphabet of designs, while Strals turns to obtuse wit: Every single one of his designs is a verbal/visual pun leading the brain to a rather immature joke or sarcastic remark.
Rough Language closes this weekend, but Saturday, March 12, an accompanying pop-hop opens at the Charm City Art Space from 1-6
. featuring limited-edition T-shirts, screenprints, zines, etc., Burtner and Strals, Ryan Duggan, Shaun Flynn, Jenna Kaminsky, Ramsey Beyer, and Isaac Gertman, including a collaborative zine by Gertman and called
Maximum Stock N Roll
. Visit ccspace.org for more details.
ALSO CLOSING
closes March 10 at C. Grimaldis Gallery.
Color Me Bad
—featuring Joshua Abelow, Brian Dunn, Ted Gahl, and Hugh Scott-Douglas—closes March 13 at Nudashank (co-owned by CP contributor Alex Ebstein). Jenee Mateer’s
and Debra Rubino’s
close March 12 at the Jordan Faye Contemporary. And
Points of View: Erotica From a Male/Female Perspective
closes March 13 at Gallery 1448.
OPENINGS
opens March 11 at Galerie Myrtis with a reception 2-7
. March 12. Chip Irvine’s
opens March 11 at Towson University’s Holtzman Art Gallery with a reception from 7:30-9
. March 10. James DuSel’s
opens March 12 at the Minás Gallery with a reception from 6-9
Bethann Wilson’s
opens March 12 at Bistro Rx (2901 E. Baltimore St.) with a 6
. reception.
