Jody Aikman

The Anatomy of Radical Action- WORM Rotterdam

Like many artists, I hope to make an impact and incite change in the socio-cultural consciousness of current society. Language is a collective material that details the course of human experience, opinion, and our collective consciousness throughout time. 

Proverbs, to carry conventional wisdoms and head warnings. Insults, to deliver injury and detriment. Declarations, to demonstrate acts of love and war. Language is ever-changing in its materiality, and yet, in its abundance, the taste of its power has become a familiarity in our mouths resulting in the inability to taste the bitter consequences tainted in its meaning. Leaving the labor to sweeten our speech and behavior patterns to be further obscured into Silence.

Silence is often mistaken as an absence but I’d like to offer the perspective that Silence is vast and completely full of itself. We give shape to silence. To punctuate its presence after soft dotted curves and mark the sound's end. We created a quiet for words to sink in. And, in its extension, having found very many ways to implement that quiet. Silence is flexible, fluid even. Lending itself to the demand of the speaker and receiver.
Within the freedom of interpretation, Silence has the ability to conceal truth and intention in plain sight. 

As a writer and poet, my research explores the depths hidden in the vastness of Silence. Richly biased and subjective in nature, meaning lies on the tongue of the orator. My practice consists of using Language as a medium to navigate the tricky landscape of ambiguity and nuance. Through conversation, observation, reflection, and literary research, I attempt to dissect the definitions,  implications, and values we, as a societal collective, have awarded to language in hopes of laying its power bare in the open, inciting change in the conscious and unconscious mind with which we motion thought, reclaim meaning, evolve ideal and ultimately use this ever-changing material for the past, present and future.