This exhibition is part of the YY OS program.*

Ungrammaticality is the consequence of having a fixed code for interpreting language. When facing a string of words not following the grammatical code, we tend to lack confidence in the interpretation because we assume the speaker uses the same code we interpret. Linguists tend to think of language as a system. Others tend to see it as a behavior. And therein lies all of the difference.

The artists in this exhibition do not conform to the code. They engage with a broad range of subject matters–what tethers them to one another is not a shared conceptual project, but a poetic sensibility to convey experiences and sentiments that are almost too ephemeral to be conveyed through our existing language construct.

In varying scales, materials, and registers, these five artists respond to the crisis of language to communicate by putting into question its basic forms and structures through distortion, citation, slippage, and jokes. They hold stakes in irresolution, contradiction, criticality, materiality, and unstable notions of selfhood.

Bailey Connolly’s sculptural syntax circles through and around relational notions of the self. In prioritizing change and movement, arrangement and rearrangement, the meaning of her work is neither stable nor autonomous and is determined by its relational proximities. Also working with modes of relation, Stephen Lordan is interested in experiments, in not knowing how things will turn out, and in the possibilities of rare coherence. Other artists in the exhibition focus on the grammar of visual representation. Hunter Foster disentangles the grammar of Neoclassicism, displacing timelessness and grandeur with softness and frangibility with his wheat-pasting drafting paper and dough. Soren Hope invites doubt into the familiar. Their paintings inhabit the realm of the not-quite-right. Depictions of yawns probe the limits of the empathetic potential of looking and bring focus to the void spaces of the body. Working with a familiar visual glossary, Soren subtly destabilizes the audience’s inherent understanding. Similarly, Ang Ziqi Zhang fragments everyday visual vocabulary like signage, diagrams, and written language to invite associative thinking and slow looking. Like sentences rewritten over and over, the works scramble and unfold their images across thin, built-up layers.

The thread that runs through these artists’ practices is, at its core, ungrammatical and prelinguistic. They identify the complexity of narration and create work that detaches meanings and feelings from their conventional explications. They provoke us to break existing rules of the everyday vernacular and build our own syntaxes with “syntax errors.”