“Parts of Speech” is a short narrative, a sentence really, about ambiguity. It is set in an aquatic environment and assisted by the edition’s variable wash of cyan blue dye. They, the subject, is an indeterminate pronoun, not only in relation to gender, but also in relation to species. Aloofish and standoffish refer back to they, but are the words adjectives that describe behavior, or are they nouns that name they as a kind of fish? Either they behave like fish, or they are fish. It depends on whether you consider the suffix to be -ish or -fish. In this narrative, they is defined by language and grammar and how the reader interprets those parts of speech.

According to the artist, the idea for this artwork can be traced to her cover design for Eileen Myles’ book of poetry, School of Fish (1997), for which she made a list of words that contain the phonetic sound of “fish” when spoken.

In all of Rosen’s language-based works, visual typographic elements like color, scale, and placement generate meaning with their specificity. Underneath crisp and tightly kerned letterforms, the color cyan, for example, wavers between green and blue. (Cyan is colloquially called aqua, meaning water.) And so in Parts of Speech, Rosen found that it was the cyanotype print itself that finally set the conditions–an “aquatic environment”–for these nascent narrative readings. After all, as Rosen has often said, we see language as well as read it.

Working with language over 50 years, Kay Rosen has reveled in the idea that letters, words, and phrases contain worlds of our own making. She has made numerous prints in collaboration with publishers and galleries including Helga Maria Klosterfelde Editions, Mark Patsfall Graphics, RENÉ SCHMITT, and Krakow Witkin Gallery, but this is her first cyanotype.