Scott Albrecht - "Louder Than Words"

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Louder Than Words, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Scott Albrecht. Joining the gallery for his second solo exhibition, the new body of work utilizes his signature graphic relief paintings and installation expanding on his deconstructed typography.

Louder Than Words is a continued exploration of Albrecht's bold graphic works. Albrecht’s work abstracts letters and characters using a graphic visual language, meant to draw the viewer in reconsidering the relationship between message and viewer. The artist states, "We interact with text passively all the time, and it can have an effect of conditioning us to consume instead of processing what is being said. These works are intentionally meant to entice the viewer to seek out the message while offering space to consider their own relationship to the idea." Many of the abstracted works are realized through varied approaches to woodworking and are the result of dozens, sometimes hundreds of individual pieces that are cut, laminated, sanded, painted, and re-assembled.

The work created for this exhibition stems from the artist’s reflections on the last year and a half starting in March of 2020. Albrecht regularly looks at distilling the nuanced and complex situations of our cultural climate. In creating these works, he looks to the experiences of isolation within the pandemic, the continued calls for social justice and equality, ideological factions, and ultimately how an individual receives these experiences. The title of the show, Louder Than Words, is “an emotional undercurrent” to the events during this time. We often use this phrasing to communicate when we have a shared knowledge but the context extends beyond the words we can find. On this, Albrecht says "it's not to say these events are indescribable, but these were such significant milestones for many of us – part of these experiences was developing an emotional vocabulary to understand them."

Reflecting on these works Albrecht adds, “All of the work for this exhibition is inspired by the events of the recent past. In my approach, I try to avoid using pronouns like 'I', 'me', 'we' etc. to allow the viewer to relate their own experience to the sentiment within the piece. In this show, I think that approach carries a different weight because the last year and a half is one of the few times we have all collectively experienced something so significant together, and because of that it allows the work to take on something of a Rorschach-like quality. Contextually these works are inspired by specific events and time, but we all experienced them in our own way, so a person’s relationship to these ideas can be both connected and unique."