I’m pleased to share Christopher Squier’s new essay, Word Pictures: Contemporary Calligrammes and Visual Typography, written to accompany Word Pictures and Poem Objects, the online exhibition he curated for Amos Eno Gallery on Artsy. My House series (1994–2017) is included in the exhibition.
Christopher begins with Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, using them as a point of departure for considering how contemporary artists continue to explore the space between language and image. Rather than treating words as straightforward vehicles for communication, the essay examines practices that foreground typography, punctuation, materiality, and ambiguity, asking how artists open language to multiple meanings before it settles into fixed interpretation.
About my work, Christopher writes:
Carol Ladewig’s House series (1994–2017) builds a structure around language, asking each combination of letters to hold its own on the canvas. As she writes, ‘These painted objects bring language into material form through stenciled words, symbolic imagery, and layered surfaces. The house is portrayed as a psychic space: a container for memory, interiority, and the unstable relationship between words, images, and lived experience … These words are straightforward and familiar, but I am interested in how unstable they become when they enter the space of a painting.'
My sincere thanks to Christopher Squier for organizing this exhibition and for writing such a thoughtful essay. The full essay can be read via the link below:
"Word Pictures: Contemporary Calligrammes and Visual Typography" by Christopher Squier
New article about "House" series: "Word Pictures" via Placebo Post
7/13/2026
I’m pleased to share Christopher Squier’s new essay, Word Pictures: Contemporary Calligrammes and Visual Typography, written to accompany Word Pictures and Poem Objects, the online exhibition he curated for Amos Eno Gallery on Artsy. My House series (1994–2017) is included in the exhibition.
Christopher begins with Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, using them as a point of departure for considering how contemporary artists continue to explore the space between language and image. Rather than treating words as straightforward vehicles for communication, the essay examines practices that foreground typography, punctuation, materiality, and ambiguity, asking how artists open language to multiple meanings before it settles into fixed interpretation.
About my work, Christopher writes:
Carol Ladewig’s House series (1994–2017) builds a structure around language, asking each combination of letters to hold its own on the canvas. As she writes, ‘These painted objects bring language into material form through stenciled words, symbolic imagery, and layered surfaces. The house is portrayed as a psychic space: a container for memory, interiority, and the unstable relationship between words, images, and lived experience … These words are straightforward and familiar, but I am interested in how unstable they become when they enter the space of a painting.'
My sincere thanks to Christopher Squier for organizing this exhibition and for writing such a thoughtful essay. The full essay can be read via the link below:
"Word Pictures: Contemporary Calligrammes and Visual Typography" by Christopher Squier
