Megan O'Connell's installation "Play of Reflections and Speed/Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse" renders the back gallery of the Whitney a trove of ocular text curiosities. Sixty unique text-and-pattern compositions of dry-transfer film and rubber on convex glass huddle in the corners of the room, playing with light and shadow. Varying in opacity and density, O'Connell's compositions provide textual information with a sculptural quality that promotes the consideration of forms and how they might feel in the mouth.
O'Connell worked with strict self-imposed compositional parameters to play with the potential pragmatic and semantic associations and combinations made possible by type saved from an architectural firm. Seemingly non sequitur utterances "Vast!" and "spacematic" and "HEAT" burst from the lenses and fold together, becoming poetry in scarlet red, black, and white, eventually asserting "...finished time becomes place..." and asks "where is the line." Also on view are O'Connell's "The Reinvention of The Truth of Gender," a collaboration with Joan Retallack, and "A Bird's Eye View," a collaboration with Fluxus artist Alison Knowles.