Small-scale and monochrome, the works opening the Hill Art Foundation’s group exhibition ‘The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts,’ feel calculated to go unnoticed. This is all the more reason to mentally detach from attention-grabbing work in nearby galleries and ponder a few lines from Adrienne Rich’s 1978 poem ‘Cartographies of Silence,’ printed on a nearby wall label: “Silence can be a plan rigorously executed…Do not confuse it with any kind of absence.” Nearby, the solitary word ‘dance’ typed repeatedly across the top of a paper by Christopher Knowles, a washy gray watercolor overlaid with a rigid grid by Agnes Martin and a stonily silent bronze bust of James Baldwin by Larry Wolhandler are alive with feeling unreliant on speech, a key intention of the show’s curator, Hilton Als. Here, Vija Celmin’s giant eraser, crafted from balsa wood and paint, strongly suggests that expression is a process of laying down and removing. (On view in Chelsea through March 29th).
