Once, back when postmodernism was trendy, everything was considered a "text," and artists even made paintings that were just sequences of words. Recent word art by David Buckingham, Skylar Fein and MRSA, is more resonant, perhaps because they deploy time more like a color or a context. New York born, New Orleans-based Skylar Fein is known for monumental, often gay-centric, works like his 2008 Prospect.1 installation Remember the Upstairs Lounge, but this Giant Metal Matchbooks series of oversize matchbooks complete with matches with realistic rubber tips--are classic examples of traditional pop art.
Hinting at pop's roots in surrealism, these nostalgia-tinged icons of throwaway incandescence advertise consumer goods ranging from Budweiser Beer and Seven-Up to "Marlin Long 22 Rifles" as they ironically, yet lovingly, illustrate how traditional American commerce can morph into culture over time. Fein's collaborations with local graffiti artist, MRSA, on this Children of the Night series, is more complex, with wood relief wall pieces incorporating a crazy quilt of sliced and diced words embedded with iconic forms like product logos or even a Confederate flag. Here geometry provides the only formal order in what amounts to a view of history as jabberwocky, in which words of wisdom and derangement battle for supremacy.

