cool story bro (2021)
Cool Story Bro incorporates text, symbols and slogans from recent history and popular culture, to explore ways in which language, speech and text can be used to oppress or liberate a body.
This work taps into the fraught historical relationship between women and swearing and the rich history of using such language as a means of challenging oppressive social and cultural norms. The use of marbled paper within the work makes historical reference to decorative cover pages within books. The labor-intensive process of tracing around these marbled collaged letters over and over again is a meditative act that stops language in motion and fixes it in place on a page outside of the body.
The smiley is a symbol that regularly surfaces in Langs work. Initially created as a symbol intended to boost the morale of employees, it has since morphed to represent various counter cultural movements, drug cultures and emojis. Shown alongside a series of feminist slogans and a cascade of curse words, the meaning of the smiley shifts again to reference the oppressive use of speech that objectifies women through catcalling and asking them to smile.
These sentiments are echoed in a series of ceramic works that explore the body as a site of objectification. Clothing and fashion are a form of social communication that is often perceived to play a key role in encouraging the objectification, dehumanization and denial of agency for female bodies. This series of ceramic clothing featuring cut outs that would leave a body exposed explores and complicates these ideas challenging the notion that clothing (which conforms to modesty norms) is a safe space.
