Echolalia: The Forgetting of Language

Echolalia: The Forgetting of Language, a series of unique screen prints, explores the metaphoric language of pattern as cultural signifier.  The patterns, based on the digitization of motifs from Buddhism, 60’s pop culture and contemporary industry, retain only traces of their origin.  Derived from an elaborate process combining digital technology with traditional media, the patterns are deconstructed and printed in perennial re-combinations of color and scale paralleling Warhol’s forays into seriality and abstraction.

Nature as both inspiration and eclipser of culture is a persistent, insistent theme in the series.  Here Lanzetta reworks this former subject mimicking nature with scrims of flowers, machine-made and symmetrical, punning both pop art and cherry blossoms, the iconic Japanese harbinger of spring. 

Repetition is a pervasive theme for Lanzetta.  Echolalia, the immediate and involuntary repetition of words, references the actual working process of the series.  A small number of silkscreens were interchanged and printed repeatedly.  As the patterns permutate from print to print, borrowing from and echoing each other, an analogy to actual language, with its fluctuating, appropriating and often ephemeral nature is drawn.  Reflecting the continual evolution of language, Lanzetta is “artist as DJ at the mixing table, spinning and weaving motifs from different cultures, experimenting with scale and repetition.” ¹  The prints, through their hybrid compositions, synthesize a new visual vocabulary referencing the shifting flux of change and exchange.

click below to see works in the series

(when viewing each work, be sure to rollover the image to see a close-up detail-the works are very intricate)

 

¹ Amy Chase Gulden  New York City  Feb. 7th, 2007
http://www. apartmenttherapy.com/ny/the-gallery/index