This website is meant as a presentation of a proposal for traveling exhibitions of works by Cecil Touchon related to language based experimental artworks.
This exhibition focuses on language and information as the theme and subject of exploration. Through a variety of techniques Touchon, as a cultural hunter/gatherer, accumulates found materials and then edits and rearranges them often through chance operations. The works are experiments in communicating poetically about the fabric of our
communication environment. Touchon draws from the landscape of what he calls the ‘Massurreality’ an overarching, humo-centric surrogate reality constructed by humanity using mass media. Our human world is an overlay on the natural world and Touchon’s works are icons addressing of this contemporary condition.
Works in the exhibition based primarily on collage techniques include typographic abstractions, collage poetry, sound works, video and photography. The exhibition would need a projector and proper speakers for video installation and sound works.
Touchon also envisions the possibility of lectures, and collage workshops as a part of the presentation.
Contemporary Relevance
Reduced to Silence is relevant to culture today because of its exploration of the overlapping between the human experience in the natural world and the human experience in a big data world. The human experience today is greatly affected mass technology and mass media. This exhibitions attempts to conceptually deconstruct the common notions that are attached to our identity, whether its an identity given to us by way of name, of race, of socio-economic standing, of our education, our religion, our occupation, our buying habits. This exhibition also explores the idea that we are now a post-literate society, one with a short attention span which learns visually rather that through reading.
Audience
This exhibition deals with main-stream themes that have been in conversation within our culture, and we would like for those themes to be presented in a way that is engaging and accessible to many people. We want the exhibition to have an educational aspect to it where people can feel like their knowledge of subject can be enriched. We aim towards families and people of all ages. Because of the themes of ‘big-data,’ ‘technology,’ and ‘post-literacy,’ the exhibition content would be a bit more aimed towards young people (20s-30s). We want to create a submersive experience with the paintings, assemblages, sound works and video installations that is engaging towards people of all backgrounds and ages.
Artist Biography
Cecil Touchon (b. 1956) is a painter, performance artist, collector, draftsman, photographer, and curator. He was born in Austin, Texas and received his BFA from the University of Texas at Arlington. Touchon has played a major role in the fine arts arena for well over two decades and
has been the most influential through his collage work.
Using the techniques of collage, he reassembles portions of letter fonts from billboards and printed material into pure abstractions that transform verbal language into a form of visual architecture. Touchon translates his collages into large-scale paintings using trompe l’oeil techniques to create bold and striking compositions.
Touchon’s work was exhibited in the 2001 and 2009 Venice Biennale has shown up in hit movies, TV shows, and on the Paris runway via the avant-garde fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. He is a founding member of the 1987 Post-Dogmatist Group as well as a respected member of the Art Mail and Fluxus communities.
His works are found in multiple corporate collections
including those of IBM, HBO, J.P. Morgan Bank, American Airlines, American Express, Citibank, Las Vegas’s Bellagio Hotel, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Gap, Hallmark, and the Sanyo Corporation.
His work is also included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, the Tate Modern Archives, London, UK, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, Cambridge, MA, Archivo Francesco Conz, Verona Italy, and the Glasgow School of Art Library, UK.