Anti-Plumb Lines / Speak Truth
Anti-Plumb Lines / Speak Truth
Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis 2021
What does truth look like? Jill Downen’s new work engages global exchange by activating the complex ways we perceive objective and subjective truths. The exhibition invites visitors into a series of encounters with spoken word, text, and linear movements in space that twist, flex, tangle, and split into multiple pathways. The Speak Truth works range in scale and materiality and includes handmade books, sculptural objects, installations, and works on paper, plaster, concrete, steel, gold leaf, pyrite (fool’s gold), and lapis lazuli stone. The exhibition features audio recordings by international project participants that have been translated into visual forms; the artworks reveal patterns of meaning in value systems such as identity, family, and the importance of voice. The art responds to private and public space as it shifts scale from the intimate to the monumental. Downen’s Speak Truth series seeks to anchor, measure, and orient as communities collectively navigate a disinformation age.