Scope and Contents

Laxson's work combines the visual and the verbal poetically, sensitively and intellectually. She works in the book and print format, and although the pieces are generally small in scale, the power and beauty of the text, line, typography and message combine to create strong, meaningful work. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

Each page records four progressively finished images, the result of one or the other artist adding to the original drawing his/her marks through a solely artist correspondence back and forth between the two. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Catherine Foc exhibition review at MOCA GA: Over the course of her long, fecund career, Ruth Laxson has honed a unique language rooted in her fascination with forms of communication. Letters, words, hieroglyphics, mathematical symbols, equations, Braille, computer acronyms, typefaces, handwriting, pictures: the Atlanta artist uses these elements as abstract shapes, allusive imagery "” and content. Text is as important as image, be it straightforward sentences and phrases or wordplay: the puns, anagrams and lists through which she gets at more elusive meanings than linear language allows.The parameters of her subject matter and worldview are, you might say, microcosmic.* Laxson's take on enduring themes "” love, sex, power and their manifestation in relationships, feminism, war, politics and philosophy "” all are nested in perception of matter, space and time shaped by the teachings of Georgia Tech physics professor David Finkelstein and her own ruminations about God. Her works are...

Scope and Contents

This book consists of three booklets and a leaflet mounted within the hard covers. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Vamp & Tramp: An artist book in three parts, subtitled "Chance Chants," "Timing," and "Logic." In this layered study of language and consciousness, Laxson explores the spoken and printed (or written) aspects of alphabetic cultures and an eventual diminishment of image-making because it diluted the potency of words. The book moves in a nonlinear fashion (even through the more linear sections ). To greatly oversimplify: Laxson begins in prehistory symbolizing the beginning of language as an extension of image-making by a combination rebus/word map. As a concept of numerical ordering develops out of the collective chaos—"We're here in the land of scheming"— the individual (ego) takes the stage. Ultimately, an inherent richness and diversity of awareness is abandoned for one that can be explained in words—"She: We all lost our capacity for awe and wonder . . when we started writing about it. He: But writing glorified monotheism, individualism. It invented money, prose, drama,...

Scope and Contents

This book was made in collaboration with the children, ages 10-12 years, of The Atlanta School as a companion work for an opera, The Power Plan (funded with a grant from the Metropolitan Opera company. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.