Unpacking Mitchell Syrop’s Frantic Everyday Language

Lucy Tiven

Now on view at Ghebaly Gallery, Mitchell Syrop’s solo exhibition “Niza Guy” explores phonetics of identity and self-expression in scrawl and sculpture.

The show features four distinct works: “Niza Guy,” “Steel Series,” “Tom Series” “and Hidden.” In a series of 21 hand drawn phrases enlarged and installed in sequence, “Niza Guy” dissects the expressive power of language and gesture infusing the act of writing with freneticism and struggle.

Phrases like “AIM YORE BIG GUEST PHAN” serve to destabilize the viewer, appealing to familiar, colloquial language rendered practically illegible. Syrop’s notebook becomes a site of struggle as the artist violates the lines of its ruled pages while playing fast and loose with the orthographical rulebook.

Similarly, Syrop’s steel works perform investigations into acts of expression, drawing our attention to the artist’s fevered metalwork as a different, equally fraught attempt to communicate.

If “Niza Guy” and Syrop’s steel works revolve around the urge to decipher and its limitations, “Tom Series” explores linguistic absence, displaying torn posters that draw us into unsettled negative space where language or image once was.

Like “Niza Guy” and “Tom Series,” “Hidden” unpacks text as medium, exploring language in scrolls of manic, introspective prose. Set in stark contrast to the abrupt strokes and verbiage of the artist’s other work, “Hidden’s” stream of consciousness delves into the violence of language and psychology in unsettling detail.

Destabilizing the viewer with hectic strokes and idiosyncratic phonetics, the artist casts language and identity as games and its rules in which we don’t quite understand. Syrop recasts the everyday in odd and unexpected forms, drawing us closer to their creator while reminding us of the flimsy status of any epistemological inquiry.

Mitchell Syrop earned his MFA from CalArts in 1978 and lives and works in Los Angeles. His solo exhibitions include Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles; WPA Gallery, Los Angeles; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles; Galería Oliva Arauna, Madrid; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Lieberman & Saul Gallery, New York; and the Matrix Gallery, University of California, Berkeley.

His work can be seen in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“Niza Guy,” a solo show by Mitchell Syrop, is on view at Ghebaly Gallery Nov. 14, 2015 until Jan. 30, 2016.