Sticks & Stones addresses language as a political act. Using words, phrases, and symbols, this exhibition makes material the typically intangible, but very real, use of language by public figures in today’s politics and journalism. Swanson produces visual acts that subvert contemporary power structures and acknowledge a fluidity of interpretation to create something generative as opposed to destructive.

 

In Sticks & Stones, language functions as a performative gesture capable of defining one’s own identity or calling out a societal attempt to define that of another. Ideologies, like language, are fluid and enlivened through action. The viewer takes part in this performance, standing in the presence of these physical manifestations of language; their own meaning is ascribed to these words and phrases, thus creating their own reality in the face of established definitions.