You can see these two shows, Words Matter and Sticks and Stones, through July 14 at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, located on the second floor at 118 North Main Street in Providence.
TRANSCRIPT:
Gershon Stark: Negative speech has incredible power. … In Jewish tradition, a verbal assault is considered more harmful than a physical assault. Because physical assaults, it is thought you can recover from, recover from. But verbal assaults are something that can last a lifetime, and you experience over and over. And if you shaped someone’s destiny through verbal negativity, abuse, cynicism, you’re affecting someone’s destiny, and you do not have the right to do that. So with that foundation, I really started to try to work to find an artistic way to bring the message that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will harm me and can have a longer lasting effect.
Luis Hernandez: This is really two shows in one. It’s the “Sticks and Stones,” and also “Words Matter.” Could you describe how the two came together, and then as you do that just briefly describe what the “Words Matter” is, because it’s a bit different, a little bit different.
Stark: This message about the power of words is something I want to get out to a more universal participation. So we decided to have a show called “Words Matter.” But it seemed a little difficult to get people to focus just on negative speech or negative words. So we just put out a call for, where can we have, where there will be photographs where words interact with the picture – whether it’s street photography, seeing what’s out there, whether someone puts words with an image, where the words are almost hidden or underlying. And we had 411 entries for people showing how words, either see them and they react to them in the environment. And from those 411 entries, myself, and David [DeMelim, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts], and a psychologist who specializes in trauma selected 83 entries or 84. And that is what’s in the exhibit “Words Matter” now.
Hernandez: One of the interesting things about this show is that, you know, we’re looking at photographs. … And so much of our world today is photo, is visual, and yet it’s on a screen. … There’s something powerful about, wait, the photo on paper, the photo on the wall – there’s different than what you’re looking at when you’re flipping through pictures. Elaborate that for me.
Stark: For me, as a photographer and as an artist – and I grew up in the world of film, right, 40, 50 years ago, 40 years ago. And I still use a dark room, I have a dark room in my home. And I grew up having to go to a gallery, to a museum to see work. And that palpable experience of seeing work on a wall impacted me. And I think there is a physical presence to when you see work that is tangible, even if you don’t touch it, if it’s on a print, that really lets you relate to, have a relationship with and then be impacted by an image. I think when we look at things on phones or iPads or computers, there’s a kind of superficiality to it that lets us look oh, look at this, and move on. There is no physical, no emotional, no visual attachment to what’s there.
Hernandez: Everything that I see in social media, everything I see in the media, it seems very divisive, very painful, very harsh. I don’t know, your thoughts on, kind of, the state of the world as you see it. Or maybe, maybe that’s just a focus, and if we tried to look for better things and, you know, nice words or humor, we’d find that too. It’s out there.
Stark: I think cynicism is a kind of underlying construct that we all live by now. … And my hope is that somehow we can shift that back to more positive speech. … There was a religious leader in New York, he was called The Seventh Rebbe. And he focused on charity as being one of the things that will change the shifting of the world, and he focused on speech, on words. Of all the things to focus on, those are the two: give unto others, and how we’re speaking to each other. And it just pervades our society. And he said, if we could just learn to shift the dialogue to positive, we will actually change the course of the world.
To let the Artscape team know about an artist or event, please email arts@thepublicsradio.org.
The post ‘Words Matter’: Two photography exhibits show the power of words to harm and heal appeared first on TPR: The Public's Radio.