TAMARA GAYER

LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

In 2012 I had the honor of participating in one of the first iterations of Brooklyn Utopias. That opportunity prompted me to create one of my first exclusive text pieces featuring 50 idioms containing the word “play,” animated in a variety of texts and effects. I was newly exploring a relationship between
visual patterning and language and “play” was the perfect vehicle, both metaphor and method. Language fully jolted into my art making with the presidential election at the end of 2016. Feeling the need to be unambiguously political, I started toying around with the four-letter words that I was hearing on everyone’s lips (MAGA, wall, bomb, lies, guns, rise, vote, fake and fake news – a double 4) happily using them as a foil, to push the ways in which I had up till then used and explored pattern.

For this anniversary iteration of Brooklyn Utopias it seemed only natural to build upon what I had started with Play in 2012. My current focus on political language dovetails the political awaking that has swept Brooklyn and celebrates it. In the past months, as we have been struggling with the impacts of the
dueling pandemics of the emergence of COVID-19 and the recognition of racism, the specific sounds of language, be it the chants of marches which are still criss-crossing Brooklyn or songs and claps for frontline workers, the last words of victims of police violence we read in newspapers or the endless
scientific terminology we are all absorbing, resonate nightly throughout the borough. Hearing all of these, I culled some central themes to create a new animated sign that will hang above the doorway of the Old Stone House. Its language is a marker of where we are now and what we still need to do to truly actualize Brooklyn as a Utopia.

Parallel to the physical artwork, Language Is A Virus will initiate a biweekly social media campaign eliciting responses to the questions: What makes you feel safe or unsafe? What’s destroying the world and how can we keep us safe? Answers from the public will be drawn at random and added to the physical sign. Submit your responses by tagging @gayertamara and @oldstonehousebklyn with #BrooklynUtopias2020. Join me in this conversation both virtually and on 4th Avenue!

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ARTIST STATEMENT

Since adolescence, I’ve been drawing snippets of a love letter to the city. I’ve always loved the city for its capacity to take established patterns and produce unknowns. Initially much of my work was anchored by constructing recognizable public views of the city in dialogue with a series of patterns. I spent a
decade playing with these pairings in public work, exploring the effect of our hard wired compulsion to create patterns on the shapes of urban space and our perceptions of the city. Both the face of the city and what constitutes “public” changed dramatically since I started this project. The public face of the
city is now dominated by metastasizing quantities of images, garnering placement in previously unimaginable locations. Concurrently the rise of the internet and virtual social spaces transformed notions of the commons (both in what is “public” and what is “space”). Those changes freed me from
maintaining a formerly strict dualism between architecture and pattern, allowed my subject matter to explore other reaches and broadened the materials in my tool box (both technologically and with traditional materials). What hasn’t changed in this time is the driving impulse of the work which is to
hack the loop separating people, allowing new connections between people and the environment they inhabit.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tamara Gayer is an artist transfixed by the city. Suspended between the impulses of an image maker and those of a builder she creates work that mutates from drawing to installation to video. Born in NYC, Gayer grew up in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in combined media from Hunter College. She is a founding member of the Hint House, one of New York’s longest running artist/musician collectives.

In New York her work has been shown at Foxy Production, Exit Art and Smack Mellon, among others. She is represented in several prominent collections including that of the Museum of Modern Art, where she has lectured on her work.  In her quest to bring art as close as possible to the public, she has emphasized showing at a broad range of cultural institutions, non-art venues and festivals. In recent years these include the Macedonian Art Foundation, Smart Spaces, Fourth Street Art Block Festival, WayHome and Artscape/Youngplace, The Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity at Penn State.

See more of her work on Instagram.