Curated by Ross Karlan, Unoriginal Genius at Laundromat Art Space brings together works by Andre Azevedo, Katelyn Kopenhaver, Javier Martin, and Gabriel Pessoto to interrogate the aesthetic, political, and philosophical implications of language and its iterative uses in contemporary art. Taking its title and conceptual framework from Marjorie Perloff’s seminal 2010 text, the exhibition adopts her argument that citation, transcription, and constraint-based practices should be understood not as derivations but as complex, generative modes of authorship. In an age saturated by recycled images, machine-generated text, and digital identities, Unoriginal Genius repositions imitation and repetition as strategies of critique, and the use of language and text as an artistic medium that considers content, cultural and socio-political context as well as structure, form, texture and materiality.
At its core, the exhibition contends with the instability of language in both visual and textual form. The artists on view examine how meaning can be constructed, deconstructed, and displaced through acts of erasure, repetition, fragmentation, and remediation. Unoriginal Genius is an exhibition that poses countless questions without providing us with definite answers. It leaves space for thought and interpretation, and for viewers to engage through a lens of their own experiences. Just like language and the artists we communicate with in the presented works, the originality doesn't lay in the language itself. When we focus on language we are limited by alphabets, words, vocabularies, speakers and listeners. Language created, used and reused, interpreted and re-interpreted across generations, language barriers, cultures and contexts, regurgitated and drawing on endless source materials that blurs the lines between our individual thoughts and how we express them. In a digital world, this deliberate manipulation of language forces us to re-evaluate its significance.
Drawing from the poetics of absence, the show foregrounds works that question the legibility and authority of language. Many of the exhibited pieces operate through a logic of concealment or distortion. There’s a quote by Jean-Michel Basquiat: “I cross out words so you will see them more.” That sentiment—both visual and conceptual—is echoed throughout the exhibition. In several works, text isn’t legible in the traditional sense; it’s erased, crossed out, covered up, obscured, or fragmented to the point of abstraction. And yet, meaning doesn’t vanish. It shifts. When text is partially hidden, when it becomes an abstract element or is visually rendered mute, it pushes us to engage on multiple levels. The works require us to meet them with ideas and interpretations. Can we still understand a message when the signifier is erased or when the signified remains uncertain?
Upon entering the space, one encounters Javier Martin’s minimal compositions, which immediately call attention to the semiotics of language and perception. In works such as ONLY ONLINE and High Words Are Empty, text functions less as a semantic vehicle, but rather serves as a visual object. A piece meditating on the word “horizon” paradoxically positions its titular reference vertically, compelling viewers to question the authority of perspective, language and existing systems. In ONLY ONLINE, a blunt phrase becomes visually charged. High Words Are Empty—mounted high above typical viewing height—recalls advertising culture and critiques the emptiness of overexposed language, where words are omnipresent yet devoid of weight.
Katelyn Kopenhaver’s streams of consciousness use language as an extension of mental flow. Lists, fragmented sentences, poetic loops, and internal monologue take form as emotional architecture. Short phrases, when presented without context, can either reduce meaning or leave space for deeper interpretation. Kopenhaver walks this line and raises questions about voice, authorship, and the illusion of coherence in media-driven communication. Especially Things Miami Does Not Need More Of (2025) is a relatable work that offers a list of familiar frustrations that are mundane, or even cliché, but taken together, they evoke a deeply specific cultural portrait. The lists are in alphabetical order and access language and thought process as well as content from multiple points of departure. The works have an archival order, yet they seem to be incomplete and continue beyond the moment they were recorded. They capture a moment in time including additional nuance by the artist as we receive added thoughts by the artist in parenthesis, and by obliging to an accepted order they continuously also question those orders.
Her photographic text-based pieces extend this interrogation into the realm of socio-political visibility. Open Secrets (The Unreported Unsolved) recontextualizes headlines from real-life missing persons cases, foregrounding how public language can obscure as much as it reveals. Through repetition and blurring, these works underscore the structural violence of erasure—not by censorship, but through societal indifference. The result is a poignant exploration of absence, marginalization, and the limits of language in bearing witness. In those works Kopenhaver investigates existing systems and hierarchies. She asks to consider trust, sources of information, and decision making. Can we trust something blurred and damaged and unclear?
Gabriel Pessoto’s practice exists at the intersection of code, craft, and conceptual poetics. By translating digital error messages into hand-embroidered textiles, Pessoto reclaims technological language from its instrumental role and repositions it within a space of slowness, tactility, and reflection. This analog transposition draws from the tradition of concrete poetry, wherein typographic form is as significant as semantic content. In transforming ephemeral digital fragments into durable, labor-intensive objects, Pessoto challenges the ephemerality of contemporary communication and proposes a poetics of error—an embrace of malfunction as meaningful disruption.
Similarly, Andre Azevedo’s typewritten works evoke the mechanical aesthetics of 20th-century poetics, situating his practice within a lineage of artists and writers who emphasized the material constraints of language-making. Echoing the typographic experiments of Ezra Pound, Azevedo employs the typewriter as both tool and symbol, and resisting the speed of digital production in favor of a deliberate, tactile engagement with language. The fragmentation, spatialization, and repetition of words in his work gesture toward a visual grammar, where language is experienced as spatial form rather than linear narrative.
Collectively, the artists consider communication and language, systems and hierarchies, modes of authorship, artistic and poetic production and reproduction, as well as interpretation and reinterpretation. As Perloff argues, this mode of writing—and by extension, making—is not devoid of creativity but is rather steeped in critical recontextualization. In this view, the “unoriginal genius” is not an imitator but a cultural interlocutor who reassembles fragments into newly resonant configurations.
The exhibition also engages questions about visibility and access—both linguistic and social. When words are obscured, redacted, or decontextualized, what forms of exclusion are being highlighted? How do structures of language reflect broader systems of power and omission? In confronting these questions, Unoriginal Genius does not offer resolution but rather cultivates an environment of interpretive openness, where viewers are invited to reconsider the terms under which meaning is produced and received.
The digital context of the exhibition is inescapable. In an era defined by algorithmic curation, AI-generated content, and hyper-mediated communication, the exhibition offers a timely critique of how language is both commodified and destabilized. The artists featured here do not lament the loss of originality; instead, they revel in its impossibility. Their work suggests that in a world of endless echoes, it is precisely the act of recombination that yields significance.
Ultimately, Unoriginal Genius reframes authorship as assemblage and creativity as a relational process. By foregrounding repetition, citation, and disruption, the exhibition not only challenges entrenched ideas about originality but also elevates the aesthetics of reuse as a form of poetic and political agency. Through visual poetics, textual abstraction, and linguistic subversion, Azevedo, Kopenhaver, Martin, and Pessoto demonstrate that in the echo chamber of contemporary culture, it is the remix—thoughtful, critical, and intentional—that resonates most deeply.
What: Unoriginal Genius (group show)
When: Through April 26, 2025
Where: Laundromat Art Space, 185 NE 59th Street Miami, FL 33137.
More info: laundromatartspace.com
All photos courtesy of Ross Karlan
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