SPEAK!
About the Project
Installation
SPEAK! an installation of props, costumes, performance videos, the Vices and Virtues Aprons with bread shoes, and several print and drawings series. The exhibition was a touchstone for many of Rothenberg's later installations and linked her performances to possibilities for these ephemeral, temporal works in the exhibition context.
In short, the personae and objects Rothenberg creates are entities without identities, collapsing our sense of categorization, of secure boundaries. We are left to speculate, to investigate, to negotiate credibility in a word of change and expansion.
--Johanna Branson, Singularity, Chance and the Shuffle of Things
It is the quality of transformation, and with it a simultaneous sense of potential energy, that makes these objects so compelling...They all point in the direction of action, and it is through action that they undergo transformation...Language is very much at issue here, Rothenberg questions just what it is we agree to call things, what constitutes a standard, and in doing so asks whether things change once they are named.
--Daniel Eisenberg, Common Sense...
SPEAK!, Solo exhibition, Curated by Jeffrey Keough, Massachusetts College of Art, 1989