The plush seats also resemble pillowy renderings of round brackets. The gentle curve of the syntactical symbol echoed by the seat offers a similar promise of containment – a punctuation of the space and psychological suggestion of intimacy. Notably, in their malleable arrangement, these 3D brackets rarely face each other to form a closed pair, suggesting an infinite openness to deeper contemplation, or the impossibility of the clean containment of ideas. Upon entry to Moody’s Zen waiting room, visitors are invited to push a button to receive a freshly printed, machine-generated four-word poem, as if printing a ticket at a transit station. But there’s no obvious external factor to punctuate time spent here, only Moody’s invitation to reflect.

The machine-generated poems in the Open Studio space comprise four words printed list-like. This minimal composition has been used by Moody before, albeit in different configurations. In his 2020 exhibition Pause, Moody presented a series of paintings displaying disjointed words increasing in size as the stanza descended. Appropriating the format of the Snellen eye chart, a device used to measure visual acuity, Moody questions what is seen and unseen, and how the material manifestations of words – their arrangement, and the space they take up – helps determine meaning and interpretation.

Reflecting on his invention of Times New Roman, Morison speculated what William Morris may have said of the innovation:

As a new face it should, by the grace of God and the art of man, have been broad and open, generous and ample; instead, by the vice of Mammon and the misery of the machine, it is bigoted and narrow, mean and puritan.¹

This imagined retort captures Morison’s utilitarian posturing against the conjured ideals of the socialist figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. Though the reign of tightly spaced Times New Roman has been compromised by the digital age, where space is ample in the

infinite virtual landscape, the mean and puritan misery of the machine has returned in other ways. Moody’s 2020 series came at the close of a decade where – aided by social media and its reductive, gimmicky prose – language became a battleground for everyday people. A sublime over-ascription of power was afforded to words, while stiflingly literal interpretation eclipsed the potential gulf between speech and action, the complexities of context, and the traps of rhetorical dogma.

In Opinion Fatigue, Moody has largely abandoned words for typographical symbols and punctuation marks – marks that give order to written language. They help shape meaning, provide context, and order ideas. In internet speak, which favours directness and sloganistic simplicity, these details have been gradually jettisoned, though they return in the chaos of coding, password fodder, or emoticons created via typographic approximations of iconic signs. Even in the most inelegant font, these free- floating symbols possess an alluring minimal aesthetic and degree of ambiguous creative potential, liberated from the rigidity of didactic meaning-making.