Untitled - You Got Me By The Bulbs

Graham Gillmore’s text-based paintings and mixed-media pieces are idiosyncratic personal and cultural commentaries on the interaction of the visual and the linguistic. He uses fragments of text, elliptical sentences, logically imploding statements, and misspellings to dislocate or obscure understanding, and otherwise allows his painterly gestures to subsume both letters and meaning. “I think of these selected fragments as a kind of linguistic ‘road kill’, skeletons on which to hang the material of the painting,” he says. For Gillmore, the abstraction overrides the text in a way meant to reflect the power of the visual to overwhelm the linguistic in the outside world.