The Pain Itself

Kevin McPherson Eckhoff has persisted in reading what was meant to be illegible, or irrelevant, or what Robert Smithson might have referred to as "language to be looked at" rather than words to be read. Undesigning the cipher of a place-holder, the matrix of layout meant merely to give space, he has transformed geometry into signification. In the process he renders "not the euphemism, [but rather] it" what the sheer materiality of language insists on continuing to say despite our best efforts to muffle, disrupt, or ignore it. Craig Dworkin, author of Reading the Illegible and The Perverse Library