Crank, 2001, chrome-plated steel,
23.5 X 19.5 inches |
In his work, Switzer plays on the visual coding of graphic font styles, exploring the visual and sculptural possibilities of text, while undermining the viewer’s assumptions of how the texts themselves should read. His use of ‘horror’ style fonts in chrome-plated steel remind us of the safe-but-scary opening credits of cartoons like Scooby-Doo, while the texts themselves read as serious, if ambiguous messages: Imagine that I know what you need and Shower the people you love with love. The artist’s interests have centered around notions of pathology, in particular the ‘deviation from an assumed normal state’. Other sculptural works recall medical packaging, the text of which reads as darkly humorous dosage instructions (‘anti-obsessional agent for the treatment of Neo-Conceptualism’) from which Switzer uses graphic trickery to pull messages from the text, in the process subverting sign, language and meaning. As the artist says, the works deal with ‘the visual typography of these prescriptions and almost act as contraindications for the larger works.’
The meaning of Switzer’s linguistic investigation lies ‘precisely in the interplay of all its elements. The images embedded within the grids rest at the threshold of decipherability, (and) they are also at the threshold of collapsing into meaninglessness.’ The viewer is both enticed toward and excluded from the work, and an ambiguous space is created, ‘one which both entraps the gaze while at the same time creating an impediment to the gazes’ ability to concretize what it sees.’
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