RECENT WORK
1,000 WORDS
Memorizing vocabulary is probably the most important task when learning a new language….If you want to learn English, you should learn 1000 most important English words first…then you will be able to understand 75% of the English language….writer Joshua Foer talks about how he managed to learn a language in about 22 hours of work, and how the 1,000 most common words were the magic number for the rest of his experience.
--Ad text for ESL site
The magic numbers! 75% comprehension! 22 hours! 1,000 words!
I cannot help but wonder how effective such a collection of bare words could be. What can we say to one another with one thousand words? I imagine the power of language reduced to little more than small discs, selected at random to be tossed at unwitting passers-by. Is that what we do: fling “if”, “and”, or “but” back and forth at one another?
I have placed each of these thousand words in different configurations: as separate tags that can be plucked out of the air, as a pattern overlaying the listener with other patterns, and finally as having disappeared into books with their tangle of idiom and meaning.
PASSENGERS
We are at our most vulnerable when we walk into an airport. Once we enter the terminal, we become a parcel to be shunted from one location to the next. We are ticketed, videoed, photographed, surveilled, searched, and sorted.
In this body of work, whether printed on small metal rectangles or large silk panels, I explore how we cope while being consumed by this shared space. How do we look, how do we feel, how do we behave in airports? Anonymity becomes a valuable resource; we limit our interactions to the most basic of exchanges. We study our fellow passengers, but we rarely talk to them.
We eat bad food, we stare out the windows, we talk on our phones. We wait, sometimes for many hours. And then we fly.
ALPHABET
Twenty-five Years of Arts and Letters
For this most recent work, I bought two milk crates full of discarded marquee letters for twenty-five dollars. I was desperate to have them, although at the time, I wasn’t sure why.
Now, after having cut them, drilled them, sewn them, laminated both metal and paper onto them, I have an idea or two.
Letters and numbers are miracles. They can tell us everything from how much a sixpack is at the gas station (Bud Light $4.99!!!) to who someone is (Hi! My name is…Ann), what something is, when, where—well, you get the idea.
And how did you get that idea? By reading these letters, right here on this page. Like I said, a miracle.
