Similar to when an actor tries their hand at singing or when a singer appears on screen, I experience a noticeable scepticism and disdain when visual artists encroach on the world of words. Part of it is just a matter of defending my turf and part of it is protecting my investment in the visual aspect of visual art. As one curator said of an installation I exhibited during my brief tenure as a visual artist: “There are too many words.” His dismissal stung, but I knew he was right. Which is not to say there is no place for text in art: titles, words on canvas, and speech in performance/video/sound can all be in service of the visual (and, admittedly, the visual has at times been usurped by the conceptual). Down to Write You This Poem Sat is a group exhibition currently on view at the Oakville Galleries that dives into the deep end of verbosity by gathering together contemporary art that embraces poetry. 
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, ALL FALL DOWN, 2002; SAMSUNG, 2000; GALACTIC TIDES BY NIGHT, 2009 (photo: Toni Hafkenscheid)
In addition to the risk of there being too many words for a venue that promises visuals, there’s also the matter of the sound that is the material manifestation of the words taking up space where folks are expecting to see rather than hear. Thankfully contemporary art dropped such medium specific expectations long ago, but to help anyone still tied to the idea that the contents of an art gallery should appeal to the eyes and the eyes only (which is basically the majority of the planet), a number of the artists in this show root their work in concrete poetry that treats the formal presentation of text as one part of its meaning.
The inspiration for the exhibition title and the ur-work within it is an early computer graphic animation by bpNicol that appears on monitors in both gallery sites. Saved from obscurity by some digital archaeology and technological reconstruction, the work is weirdly nostalgic, crummy, delightful, and disorienting simply because of its means of presentation. The way the words dance across the screen to emphasize the non-linear generation of meaning shouldn’t be so surprising, but the simplicity of each brief epigram makes it so.
In a more straightforward but no less engaging way, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES advances text to the screen-age by animating narratives to the rhythms of music. These propulsive videos not only compel the viewer to follow along with the story, they make the rhythm of speech visual and highlight the patterns of expression. 
Hanne Lippard, Locus, 2011, audio (photo: Toni Hafkenscheid)
Hanne Lippard’s contribution represents one purist extreme by simply existing as an audio recording played in the gallery. Her palindrome of a poem is conveniently, though insignificantly, complemented by the windows looking out onto the Gairloch Gardens. At another extreme is Adam Pendleton’s unembellished wall text referencing Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement. The politics of identity, in particular the ways in which language can determine and trouble that which defines us, are explored in greater depth through Martine Sym’s Lessons I-XXX, Hannah Black’s My Bodies and The Neck, and Tanya Lukin Linklater’s The Harvest Sturdies.
By shifting away from the formal quality of verse toward the use of words to express what language cannot (the truth of a poem is always to be found in the spaces between the words), these latter works provide as good an argument as any to justify the link between the visual arts and poetry. In the end, both have more to do with expression, evocation, and implication than the gap-filling explanations and instructions of pedestrian prose.
Oakville Galleries: http://www.oakvillegalleries.com/
Down to Write You This Poem Sat continues until September 3.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Down to Write You This Poem Sat at Oakville Galleries
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