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A woman in a flowing cobalt blue dress with a flowing train stretches with arms above her head. Downtown Los Angeles in the background beneath the blue California sky

Unstable Tongues: The Instability of Language at Durden and Ray Downtown

3 weeks ago Staff Writer

Curated by Dena Novak, Jenny Hager and Valerie Wilcox

Durden and Ray presents Unstable Tongues: The Instability of Language now running through May 23 in downtown LA. This exhibition examines abstraction as a living linguistic system, one that fractures, reformulates, and resists clarity. The exhibition brings together artists who use gesture, surface, and structure as communicative tools, exploring how meaning emerges from instability rather than coherence. Grounded in Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, the exhibition approaches language as a perpetual act of deferral. Never fixed, always in motion. Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text and Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel further frame this instability as fertile terrain for visual and emotional meaning. The works in Unstable Tongues do not illustrate theory; they perform it. Through layering, erasure, and transformation, they articulate the limits of language and reveal the material body as a site of communication.

Artists:

Nick Aguayo, Xixi Edelsbrunner, Flower Arrangement, Jenny Hager, Michael Harnish, Benjamin Heiken, Agnes Hong, David Lloyd, Sara Mehrinfar, Dena Novak, Max Presneill, Levon Riggins and Valerie Wilcox.

Unstable Tongues proposes that abstraction is not silence but a language of its own: physical, fragmented, and sensorial. Meaning here is built through gesture, through repetition, and through the pleasure of disintegration.

The show is now running through May 23 at Durden and Ray, downtown at 1206 Maple Ave. #832, Los Angeles, CA 90015. Follow them on Instagram/Facebook: @DurdenAndRay