In their exclamatory exuberance, the visual signifiers in a Joan Snyder image seem to emit actual sound. The word “CHANT” is repeated across the surface of one of her recent monoprints in different “voices” — and at different volumes — with varyingly thudding and plaintive insistence. The words butt up against swirling cloud-cum-flower forms as cursive scrawl meanders into frenetic mark making whose agitations, in turn, inch towards the outlines of primitive ideographs. Conflation of visual and aural senses finds equivalency in another monoprint in this tight display of early and recent works in that medium in the ecumenical intersection of Latin verses from the Requiem and the Hebrew of the Kaddish. It can be hard to tell whether the different traditions cohabit or spar. Boundaries similarly blur between the personal and the communal, quotidian and fine art materials, the provisional and the considered. Suspended in indeterminacy, you never quite know whether you’re in the presence of random littering or exquisite design. DAVID COHEN
Joan Snyder: Six Chants and One Altar at Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art, 548 West 28th Street, Suite 636. Pictured: Chant/Forever, 2018
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