O Reader, 2006

ceramic tile installations

each set of 66 ceramic tiles 40” x 48” overall, each tile 6” x 4”

 

Cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing, uses a system of marks impressed into clay tablets. The four sets of tiles pictured here also use a system of impressions in clay to transcribe a quotation from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. 

 

And you, too, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading.

 

The tiles bear low relief impressions from rubber stamps based on my anthropomorphic alphabetic, twenty-six images of phonetic signs. These are not the letters themselves, but representations of letters; the letter must be reconstructed in the mind of the viewer through an active effort of cognition. Clusters of these signs form words, and the cluster of words are semantically organized to make a verbal statement about the act of reading.

 

The morphing grids are animated translations of a dance sequence using a computer program designed as a bio-statistical tool to detect anomalies in the human brain.  Like the alphabetic compositions they punctuate, these grids map the human body into a patterned system of signs measuring, recording, and inevitably obscuring direct human experience.