Gary Gissler

Writing in very cramped script, Gary Gissler repeats the phrase “dying to know” across the surface of this small work. This gesture—reducing language to a series of repeated words or phrase fragments without context—is a hallmark of Gissler’s practice. By blurring the boundaries between text and image, he draws our attention to the search for meaning, working small to pull us in and slow us down. As he recently explained:

The micro nature, the scale, it’s decidedly a strategy to slow down looking, and to inaugurate a different kind of recognition, or cognition. I’m interested in making a nothing. It’s in that space that experience can be freed from language. . . . Sometimes the less that is offered, the more is allowed.

–Conor Moynihan, associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs