Art At Institute Library Minces Words

There’s a model of a barbed-wire fence erected in a sandy landscape, like part of an elaborate train set. The political context, given President Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, is obvious. At first, that context might make the letters spelling out You’re Welcome read like a taunt, a message from the authorities who built the fence to the people on the other side of it, the people being kept out. But look a little closer and you’ll see the hole clipped in the fence, big enough to crawl through.

And then, there on the ground next to the hole, a pair of pliers, and a ball of yarn. A story unfolds. No sooner was the fence built, but the hole was made, and the sign put up.

You’re welcome. Maybe the phrase isn’t just anticipating thanks for making it easier to get through the fence. Maybe it’s also a statement about the reception that people might get once they crawl through that hole. If the authorities are trying to keep people out, maybe a lot of people think letting more people in is just fine.

The power of language in art is the subject of ​“Mincing Words: The Tactile Language of Unrest,” an exhibit at the Institute Library curated by Martha Willette Lewis and running until May 21. In the show, nine artists — David Borawski, Matthew J. Feiner, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Learn – as – Protest, Cayla Lockwood, Jeff Mueller of Dexterity Press, Scott Schuldt, Rita Valley, and Robert Zott — use a combination of words and images to comment on our current condition, to push back and comment on the way we are assailed with language in contemporary society, through advertisements, the social media, and (ahem) the news. The results are timely, fun, and thought-provoking.

Some — such as Matthew Feiner’s ​“17 Untitled Works” and Kirsten Hassenfeld’s ​“24 Men and 3 Women I Want to Kill (After Defarge)” — capture a sense of the disorientation and, for many people, anger, that can come from the onslaught of current events itself. But Feiner’s and Hassenfeld’s pieces also offer the beginnings of a way forward, a sense of humor and also hope. A similar line of thinking runs through Rita Valley’s ornate quilts. Her ​“Monetize Me” is designed in the style of a tapestry that might be hanging on the wall of a community center or held like a flag in a parade, imbuing the piece with a sense of ironic pride. The border of the tapestry features a fringe of dimes sewn into it — each coin with a hole punched through it, defacing it to make it part of the art.

Other pieces step away from the chaos to ​“come at this with a positive approach,” as Jeff Mueller puts it in the note accompanying his prints, ​“You Are Forever Colors.” His original idea, the note explains, had been to make three much more overtly political (and sarcastic) broadsides. But in the work he came up, you can imagine the artist himself stopping and taking a breath. His three pieces all feature moths, somehow delicate and robust at the same time, hovering within textured surfaces. These fluttering spaces make forever colors, the first reads. These everlasting colors hover around us, reads the second. You make light, reads the third. Meanwhile, Robert Zott’s ​“Power and Money” — six photographs of headstones, arranged almost as if in a small graveyard — offer a message John Lennon might have loved, as three of the headstones commemorate the death of money. Power lies buried beneath the other three.

Scott Schuldt’s ​“Border Wall Proposal – 1% for the Arts” uses the conventions of a blueprint to strike a middle distance between plunging into the chaos of current events and taking a few steps back. Lockwood’s piece above highlighted the possible futility of building a border fence. Schuldt’s piece draws attention to what is lost even by contemplating it. A warning quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln adorns the design; in the interest of accuracy, there is debate over whether Lincoln actually said this, though he said something to that effect in a speech in 1838. In any case, the blueprint clarifies that the wall doesn’t need a quote from Lincoln to get its point across. As the plans explain, Lady Liberty must be cut into pieces and inelegantly reassembled. Parts of the wall must be slotted into her. Barbed wire must be strung at various points around her head, her neck, her torso.

Is it worth it? In the gallery on the quiet third floor of the Institute Library, itself a refuge from the noise of the city, the exhibit offers a chance for viewers to stop, catch their breaths, turn the onslaught of current events over in their minds, and collect their thoughts.

“Mincing Words: The Tactile Language of Unrest” runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., until May 21. Admission is free. Click here for more information.