Michael Genovese sets out to examine the American public during a time of transition, with a four-year exchange, creating a social dialogue through the most fundamental form of communication – written conversation. With Post-Post Script, Genovese presented the second of two exhibitions. Five hand-engraved metal silhouettes that reference the shapes of relics carved with the languages of early civilizations, such as the Rosetta Stone and the Seven Tablets of Creation. The mirror-polished and electroplated nickel surface is engraved by hand with a codex designed by the artist, composed into paragraphs, columns, and grids that recall newspaper or editorial design layouts. The information is compromised of transcriptions of the social commentary gathered during his one-year visiting artist tenure at the Frost Art Museum and Florida International University. Genovese’s project included a public participation component where over 20 aluminum composite panels with styluses were installed in social spaces and were carved into with specific themes (existentialism, faith, dreams, and stereotypes, for example) throughout campus and Miami-Dade County. The commentary was documented by the artist and students by transcribing and translating it into English, Spanish, Polish, and Haitian Creole; the text was then used as subject matter for the engravings.

In addition to the relics, ephemera created during the process is displayed in vitrines with a large-scale in-situ wall work titled Mimesis. The documentation is a result of researching the transcriptions through Google image searches and printing out illustrative interpretations of the provided text. “Something in the way she moves” is a Kodak metallic print of an out-of-focus, cloudy sky, paired with a collage titled “FF13” that is combined with a Robert Mapplethorpe reproduction – an editorial image of a female model and an illustrated found book page of unknown subjects sleeping with a shard of polished steel and a breathe easy strip. Next to the collage there are two laserjet prints of transcriptions from the plates, Dreams (2012), in English and Haitian Creole. The two in-situ wall works are steel reliefs of fissures that are nickel-plated and mirror-polished. The irregular lines are sourced from the And Justice for all… Metallica album cover illustration, by Stephan Gorman, and wall fractures found in documentation of Pompeii wall frescoes. Mimesis functions as a moment of silence within the exhibition at a time of information overload and where people and language are the primary subject matter.