The Alphabetum (A—Z)

* New Work/personal
experimental research
Photography series

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2022— Professional-Scott Raffe Spirit Award Graphex #53 Award (Art Directors Club of Tulsa).

We all possess the inner ability to use our imagination to project images onto definite or formless shapes. From it trickles emotion, sensation, and language, and from language narrative flourishes. I am fascinated by the ways in which this discrete ability helps me engage with the quotidian, the pedestrian, the unknown.

I have titled these abstracted typographic forms The Alphabetum as a nod towards the Celestial Alphabet, invented in the 16th century by scholars studying angelic kingdoms. Within the Celestial Alphabet, the arrangement of stars in the night sky expresses the hidden voice of God in writing. I think of each of my typographic forms as a poetic and mysterious language whose interpretation remains open-ended. My Alphabetum summons a mysterious hidden voice.

The Alphabetum series combines digital, analog, and experimental strategies, which work with improvisational modes of visual inquiry. I use the camera as an exploratory tool to exercise my imagination and critically study a repertoire of found objects and materials. I explore typography through objects with transparent, reflective, and porous qualities, which act as agents to modulate and activate color, pattern, texture, light, shadow, and movement in front of the camera. During the process, I am struck by the ease with which typographic forms move in new realms of interpretative possibilities.

Images were developed in-camera = no photoshop