PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California Art is presenting Alexandra Grant and Steve Roden: “These Carnations Defy Language,” a remarkable collaborative exhibition that began as a conversation between the artists about an anthology of the French poet Francis Ponge and, in particular, his poem “The Carnation.” This exhibition stems from that conversation, which presents new individual and co-created works by Grant and Roden that highlight their use of textual sources and their own conceptual systems to inspire and structure their production.

Grant’s paintings from her new series “Antigone 3000” continue her inquiry of literary texts as source material for her imagery. The works in “These Carnations Defy Language” explore and map the Greek myth of Antigone from its original basis in Sophocles’s text to a current exchange on the importance of Antigone to future generations with Pasadenabased poet and artist Kate Durbin. Roden introduces a new body of work that explores an issue of the architecture and design magazine Domus that he found in his father’s basement from April 1964, the month that Roden was born. In a palette of black, green, white, salmon, pink, and dark brown, the paintings, drawings, collages, and a silent video also respond to Ponge’s use of permutations, repetition, and various points of view.

In addition, the exhibition includes a collaborative series of works on paper that explore a text that has inspired both artists: Francis Ponge’s Mute Objects of Expression, a book of poems from which the exhibition’s title is taken. The poet wrote, “Accept the challenge things offer to language. These carnations, for instance, defy language. I won’t rest till I have drawn together a few words that will compel anyone reading or hearing them to say: this has to do with something like a carnation.”

Pushing the artists’ interests in language and systems beyond the gallery walls, “These Carnations Defy Language” features a brochure with an essay by Leslie Jones, Ph.D., Curator of Prints and Drawings at LACMA. The exhibition is organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art.