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The Language of Names Walker Film/Video artist-in-residence Alan Berliner has dedicated the majority of his work to the legacy of the family album and the personal histories embedded within surnames. The exhibition begins with a visual poem on the museum’s lobby wall containing the 18,244 names of every resident within the 10-zip-code area surrounding the Walker. Upstairs in the Andersen Window Gallery, the installation continues with eight works, including an interactive audio cabinet, a 20-by-24-foot collage, a giant letter-magnet board, and five digital works, upon which the online component of the exhibition is based. These works are:
Sign in, Please – A visitor enters his/her name by pushing letters mounted on the wall. That name is added to an animation displayed above the letters and sent to the next two monitors.
A Name in the Crowd -- Each participant is asked to locate their home on a detailed aerial map, identify their race, religion, and nationality, and use that data to plot a representational “dot” on the map.
Keeping up with the Joneses -- The viewer spells his/her name and then can see how it ranks according to the Social Security Administration’s list of the 55,000 most common surnames in the United States.
Name Calling -- Visitors use one telephone to record their stories and another to listen to people sharing their “name stories.”
Fingerprints -- Those who sign a small touch screen can watch as their signature is combined others to create an abstract “video painting.”
“I want this project to serve as a kind of mirror -- a way of allowing you to better understand and appreciate the ways in which “the language of names” is spoken by the diversity of races, religions, nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures that form the complex tapestry of the urban Minneapolis landscape.” -- Alan Berliner
Alan Berliner’s Film/Video residency is made possible by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.
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