Brad Terhune: “Shudder of Meaning”

The collage artist turns the visual language of magazine advertising and layout back on itself.

Officially chopped and screwed: Brad Terhune's collage.

Brad Terhune appreciates characters. His collages feature letters in pretty arrays: halves of headlines, inverted captions, torn-up newsprint strips and big bossy curves and loops. As words are wont to do, these phrases congeal into sentences. In turn, those sentences sometimes carry a social or political point he’d like to make. But sometimes Terhune is simply letting his appreciation of commercial layout show, and reveling in the power of fonts. In “Shudder of Meaning,” his small, crisp, coherent, and delightful exhibition at Outliers Gallery (150 Bay St., 2nd floor), he is in our faces with typefaces, including movie poster letters, thick, rounded, and pink, italicized text tipping at a windswept angle to communicate extra urgency, magazine copy with uptight kerning, and vowels and consonants affirming dignity with each serif.   

Terhune might tuck his words into gutters between torn sheets of printed paper or snip a printed sentence into a rectangle and affix the strip above a block of midday azure. He’ll play with different sizes of letters, different styles, each connoting something through its weight and position in the frame. In a piece that could be called “In an Ultra Light” (the art in “Shudder of Meaning” isn’t titled, but many of these collages bear phrases so proudly and with such emphasis that they practically title themselves), a date is even given. Printing on the lower margin of a page incorporated into the frame tells us it’s April 2024.

Wild blue yonder.

We know that the dated page is only one of the sheets he’s amalgamated into the artwork. Other pieces of paper might have a different provenance. One page is partially occluded by the patterned interior of a mail envelope. Behind it runs a column of alphabetic characters in bright orange print, each one severed in the middle of its second letter. We can’t tell what the text originally read, but the characters we see are suggestive: EX, FE, DO, among others. Is a message getting Fedex-ed? Do the nearby references to submergence and the sea-blue fields suggest that the torn letter has been lost overseas?  And what of the Asian woman whose round face, cut down the middle by some photo editor in a magazine layout room, completes the circle of the letter O? Is the missing missive going to her, or coming from her, or is she just here to watch the miscommunication unfold?

This is the sort of drama that Terhune’s collages generate — a drama enhanced, if never exactly completed, by the artist’s choice of words. His pieces often feel like rebuses: plays of text and symbol that seem as decorative as a glossy Vogue centerfold at first glance, but almost always add up to a particular meaning, or several interlocking meanings, once the viewer engages in a bit of sleuthing. Terhune encourages us to play along by keeping the tone (superficially) light, photojournalistic, and advertorial. He presents his assemblages as a visual puzzle we can’t help but try to riddle out.

As modern subjects, we do this reflexively. We demythologize billboards and magazine advertisements as a way to arm ourselves against the psychological manipulation that we know is lurking there. The "Shudder of Meaning" pieces don't need to beg us for interpretation. Through their interplay between font, image and sheer Conde Nast glamor, they elicit interpretation automatically.

Take "Disturbance of Thought and Distortion of Reality" (once again an apparent title rather than an official one). We're shown two half-faces, cosmetic-decorated and smoothed in the manner of fashion models. One wears a crystal on her cheek and a pearl in her earlobe. The other leads with a wide and strategically rouged cheekbone and a lush pair of lipsticked lips open just enough to connote desire and appraisal. We know how this works — we've experienced the dynamic in the pages of periodicals and on the sides of buses for as long as we can remember being media-aware. These women are looking at us. They present us with an impression that we can get a signal to them if we only telegraph it correctly.

Contrails, smoke, beauty, and warning signs.

But in Terhune's frame of torn-up pages, they confront us from beneath a stormy black-and-white crown and the peaks and valleys of another ripped-open envelope. The head of the woman on the right rides upon a "neck" of supercompressed video captures; the woman on the left sports a pair of spiny white protuberances where her left eye should be. The text that crawls up the side of the image is severed in half, but still readable: it dares us, as many ads do, to succumb to our curiosity. Cravings, in Terhune's work, often lead directly to danger.

Sometimes it’s the act of cutting a figure in half that releases the energy that prompts the fission. “Scarred in Car Wrecks” places the upper right quadrant of a woman’s face on the left side of the frame and upper left on the right. Beneath her, a school of hammerhead sharks swim next to a rifleman’s target; above her, a corporate logo rises like a moon over a mountain range. This is both funny and scary, suffused in digital blue as it is and powered by the artist’s impertinence. Slopes are a motif, as is the dead letter file, as are distant skies, fish, flight, and textures reminiscent of the ocean seen from far above it. Everything seems quite far away.

The aesthetic of old-school cigarette advertisements — and their vague promise of adventure in an exotic place — swaggers right to the forefront in “Vantage,” where we’re tempted with another “ultra light” experience in a manner that Sports Illustrated readers will recognize. To emphasize the point, he’s affixed a strip of text that reads “America’s Surplus” to a corner of the piece. The words are legible, but the paper is torn.

A word upside down is still a word.

Is all of this anti-materialism  a bit puritanical? Maybe. Vivid as the show is, there’s a spirit of austerity that runs through “Shudder of Meaning.” Terhune has drained much of the color from his most recent magazine collages, opting instead to cut up yellowing back issues of Life, most the shade of masking tape. The pages are so old that they’re practically translucent, which means we can see lines peeking through other lines, and paragraphs buried beneath the layers of paper. This is printed text as a dark, cloudlike, nonverbal commentary murmuring beneath the surface of the pieces.

The greyscale (or beige-scale) tone of these collages makes them feel more like newsprint than magazine copy. It allows Terhune to concentrate his on the lettering, covering up parts of words, truncating sentences, and daring us to follow lines of text as they slip under the cover of paper. In “Turnout That Engulfs,” he gives us nothing but the heavy feet of a pair of words, knocked out of a black background and teasing a meaning that isn’t immediately clear. It would be conceptually coherent if the piece was telling us that we’re all “Used Up.” But without peeling back the paper, there’s no way to know for sure. And this cagy showman and generator of ambiguity will wink at us, but he certainly won’t tell.

(Outliers Gallery is on the second floor of the arts complex at 150 Bay Street. When you leave the elevators, walk straight. Go past the two main galleries. You will see it. There's usually someone attending the gallery from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. on weekends.)