NW 21st Ave. On the opposite wall are Pitkin's tiny, computer-generated images of human mouths. Cropped from the faces to which they belong, they're portrayed in the act of speaking. The artist credits Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as primary inspiration for this exhibition. Pitkin considers this story a reminder not to take things, particularly effective communication, for granted.
Words are often misunderstood.
Pitkin renders songbirds without the context of a forest, mouths without the context of faces, words without the context of sentences. Like the artist's two media, unheard or misunderstood songs and words date from the beginning of verbal communication to the present moment. The show's title is provocative in itself, and the written artist's statement is downright poetic. Pitkin's explanation had me momentarily convinced that both bodies of work were about the subjectiveness of communication. In fact, the aesthetic relationship between the digital prints and the charcoal drawings is tenuous.