Co-curated with Heather Kapplow as Dirty Time
Flux House • Governors Island, NYC, USA • September 23 - October 1, 2023
Even though dirt is where our food comes from, is where our bodies get buried when we die, and is literally everywhere we go, it is not represented yet in the emoji universe. Somehow we have emojis for unicorns, pufferfish, poodles and Santa Claus, but not dirt! Dirty Signs was an exhibition of international artist responses to the idea of emojifying dirt, featuring works by B a r b a r a Schneider, Daniel S. DeLuca, Ed Woodham, Gustavo Gómez-Mejía, IPRAMENE, Lee Tusman, Liz Nofziger, M Greenwald, Maia Liebeskind, Noelle Salaun, Renée Crowley, Sarah Dahlinger and Vidya Giri in 2D, 3D and 4D formats. We also collected visitor suggestions for a potential dirt emoji through a “think tank” installation and activities within the exhibition. We are continuing to collect ideas and will submit a proposal for a dirt emoji to the Unicode foundation in 2024.