Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of works that utilize text as one of their key elements. TEXT BASED launches Wednesday, May 26th, and continues through Sunday, July 11th.

From the 20th century to today, both the formal typography of text and the content of language have been adapted by artists to explore a variety of ideas. The special properties of words have made possible such significant works as Picasso's and Braque's Cubist compositions, Futurist concrete poetry, Rosalyn Drexler's Pop art and Hanne Darboven's conceptual installations.

Participating artists in TEXT BASED include Claudia Bitran, MK Guth, James Hannaham, Joan Linder, T. Kelly Mason, Dread Scott, John Wood and Paul Harrison, and Tim Youd. One new work by each artist will be revealed every two weeks.

Download Full Press Release

Claudia Bitran (b. 1986) works primarily in painting and video. She holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013), a BFA from the Universidad Catolica de Chile (2009) and is currently an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Bitran has exhibited individually at Walter Storms Galerie in Munich, Spring Break Art Show in NY, Muhlenberg College Gallery and Practice Gallery in PA, the Brooklyn Bridge Park in NY, Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico, and at Museo de Artes Visuales in Santiago, Chile. She has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Smack Mellon Studio Program, Outpost Projects, and Pioneer Works. Grants and awards include: The New York Trust Van Lier Fellowship, Hammersley Grant, Emergency Grant for Artists Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Filmmakers, 1st Prize Britney Spears Dance Challenge, 1st Prize UFO McDonald's Painting Competition, and 1st honorable mention at Bienal de Artes Mediales, Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

MK Guth (b. 1963) works in video, photography, sculpture, performance, and interactive projects. She has exhibited internationally at numerous museums and festivals including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Schneider Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Nottdance Festival, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Frye Art Museum, and The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. She is a founding member of the Red Shoe Delivery Service, an ongoing collaborative performance project with artists Molly Dilworth and Cris Moss. Guth is the Director of the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies and interim Chair of the Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

James Hannaham (b. 1968) has exhibited at Open Source Gallery, Kimberly-Klark Gallery, 490 Atlantic, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Asphodel, and James Cohan Gallery. This past summer, his construction Everything Is Fine, Everything Is Fine, Everything Is Normal, Everything Is Normal, garnered Best in Show at Biblio Spectaculum at Main Street Arts. He is the author of the novels God Says No, an American Library Association honor book, and Delicious Foods, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book and winner of the PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. In the fall of 2021, Soft Skull Press will publish Pilot Impostor, a series of his multigenre responses to poems by Fernando Pessoa. He was a co-founder of the performance group Elevator Repair Service and has written cultural criticism, opinion pieces, celebrity profiles, and other wordy things for the Village Voice, 4Columns, and other publications. He teaches in the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute.

Joan Linder (b. 1970) is known for her labor-intensive drawings that contain thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of tiny lines. She has exhibited at Albright College, Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Omi International Art Center, Sun Valley Art Center, Weatherspoon Art Museum and more. Her work is held in the collections of The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Davis Museum, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, Progressive Corporation, West Collection and the Zabludowicz Collection. She studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Tufts University. Among her many awards and fellowships are residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Smack Mellon, Ucross Foundation, Art Omi, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, plus a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant.

T. Kelly Mason (b. 1964) was at the forefront of the domestic Conceptualism that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1990s. His sound installations, sculptures, images, and performances activate historical and contemporary ideas of domestic space, cultural production, the body politic, and the artist's milieu. Mason has exhibited internationally at numerous institutions including the Bass Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, MOCA Los Angeles, Washington University at St. Louis, Whitney Museum of American Art, ICA London, LACMA, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Blaffer Art Museum, Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 2013, he received a Fellows of Contemporary Art Fellowship in recognition for his contributions to the California art scene. Mason currently teaches at The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and he lives in Altadena, CA.

Dread Scott (b. 1965) is an interdisciplinary artist who for three decades has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it "disgraceful" because of its transgressive use of the American flag. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others burned flags on the steps of the Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this. 

His art has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1, The Walker Art Center, Jack Shainman Gallery and street corners across the country. He is a 2019 Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellow and has received fellowships from United States Artists and Creative Capital Foundation. In 2019, he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a public performance, which was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times and on Christiane Amanpour on CNN. His art is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.

John Wood (b. 1969) and Paul Harrison (b. 1966) make single-channel videos, multi-screen video installations, prints, drawings, and sculptures that elegantly fuse advanced aesthetic research with existential comedy. The artists' spare, to-the-point works feature the actions of their own bodies, a wide variety of static and moving props, or combinations of both to illustrate the triumphs and tribulations of making art and having a life. Their work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, MoMA PS1, Mori Art Museum, Frist Art Museum, University of California Santa Barbara, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Palais de Tokyo and Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). Their work is in the collections of the Kadist Foundation, MoMA, British Council Collection, MUDAM, Tate, Centre Pompidou and more. 

Wood and Harrison met in 1989 at the Bath College of Higher Education, and have worked together since 1993. 

Tim Youd (b. 1967) is a performance and visual artist working in painting, sculpture, and video. Residencies at historic writers' homes have included William Faulkner's Rowan Oak with the University of Mississippi Art Museum (Oxford, MS), Flannery O'Connor's Andalusia with SCAD (Milledgeville and Savannah, GA), and Virginia Woolf's Monk's House (Rodmell, Sussex). His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including CAMSTL, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, The New Orleans Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, Hemingway-Pfeffer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, University of Mississippi Art Museum at Rowan Oak, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. He has presented and performed his 100 Novels project at the Ackland Art Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Art Omi, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and LAXART, and retyped Joe Orton's Collected Plays at The Queen's Theatre with MOCA London. He lives and works in Los Angeles.