Suzanne Oshinsky at Light and Wire Gallery
Lately I’ve been realizing that Suzanne Oshinsky and I share an interest in depicting language and misunderstandings while actively engaging the viewer, and her recent text-based work is very intriguing to me. In particular, her flash animation, Eye-dew-knot-no, recently on view at Light and Wire Gallery, forces the viewer to make mental leaps while reading passages of text with select words switching back and forth between their homophones. Each homophone is a hyperlink, which when clicked on brings the reader to additional passages of a seemingly disjointed narrative. The process of reading becomes more active than passive, as if one is simultaneously reading and translating a second language. At first this process of decoding text is more present than the narrative itself, however depending on which homophone is clicked the next screen might repeat something already read, allowing for second and third reads which brings the scenes and scenarios depicted into vivid focus in the reader’s head. Eye-dew-knot-no reads like an email from my father-in-law, with his practice of purposefully using the wrong homophone, and Oshinsky has been interested in these misreadings in other recent work, but the complexity in both form and content is what makes this animation more successful.