The St. Louis Artists' Guild is proud to host Chaotic and Harmonious, an exhibition of the collaborative work of Ladan Bahmani and Brian Patrick Franklin, contemplates the role of repetition in mass communication and its influence on the creation and destruction of meaning.

Abstract text and short fiction work together to present a narrative leading through the entire mixed-media installation, as patterns and imagery borrowed from illuminated manuscripts in the artists’ Persian and Irish backgrounds instill the language with a weight of meaning, reverence, and authority intrinsic to those historical books.

Over the course of each paragraph, recognizable letterforms rise and fall from fields of noise to create short phrases just barely decipherable. As the text oscillates between being legible and being illegible, words continually appear, break down, dissolve, and transform into new phrases. Each message stands alone in its ambiguous intent, while at the same time, connecting with the phrases in neighboring works. As viewers move from one composition to another, the phrases they uncover string together to form a unique poetry of their path and point toward the collective power in language and meaning. While the disruptions in each letterform disconnect us from the language that we are familiar with, the repeated structure of the text provides just enough clues to encourage the reader to decode each now-abstract phrase.

Gallery Hours;
Tuesday-Friday | 10am-6pm
Saturdays | 10am-4pm