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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Alpha Beta Data
Stephen Andrews, Robert Bean, Michelle Gay,
Vid Ingelevics, Carol Laing, Yam Lau,
Michael Maranda, Lorna Mills, Cheryl Sourkes
akau inc. 1186 Queen Street West, Toronto
August 5, 2006 – September 2, 2006
Opening event: August 11, 7:00 PM
Alpha Beta Data is an exhibition of work that contains written language, a contemporary update of an eternal practice. As a form of mark making, writing as such has always existed in the realm of the visual. The modern alphabet routes back through Greek, Hebrew and Phoenician to iconographic Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Letters began as pictures: A derives from the head of the ox, N from the shape of the snake, O from an open eye, etc. Artists and artisans have always integrated pictures and letters into scrolls, tablets, monuments, wall decoration, etc.As you can see from my video still image on the right side of the graphic, you can take me anywhere, sort of, including this very elegant exhibition that Cheryl Sourkes has organized.
Each artist in Alpha Beta Data uses script in their work, but each engages with it differently. Some deal with meaning, others with the symbolic or pictorial nature of the letters and numerals themselves.
To make the drawings in Body Count, Stephen Andrews isolated numbers of casualties from front-page headlines in the watershed year that followed 9/11. Robert Bean’s Études are scans of found typewriter exercises. His Folds are photographs of Études, which have been crumpled. Michelle Gay’s Experiments with a Reader uses original code to drive computer animation, interactivity and audio components. LoopLoop (from this series) is an interactive poem. Vid Ingelevics’s short video piece, Common Birds of Southern Ontario brings the ‘sound poetry’ of transcribed birdsong to the screen. Carol Laing’s drawings of the Claudian Letters present symbols invented during the reign of the emperor Claudius, which were then discarded for two millennia, and now have been adopted for use in Unicode. To make In the River, North of the Future, Yam Lau had Paul Celan’s last poem, Rebleute Graben engraved on a hand-blown, glass bottle. Michael Maranda used his formalist eye to rearrange the contents of the philosophical texts of Immanuel Kant. Lorna Mills’s DVD English is an on-going digital documentation of the cover of every book she can remember reading, in her life … so far. To make the digital photographs Homecammer-Messages, Cheryl Sourkes immersed herself in streaming webcams and retrieved written communication that reaches out for love and sex.
I even represent well in austere grey-scale promotional material, so in keeping with my new rigorous image, my usual Google Earth! mapping of the event location has been desaturated. (but remains, like all my previous maps, quite unhelpful)
My piece, English - 2006 edition contains 2,480 images, each one on-screen for 2 seconds.
I am also available for dinner party conversation.
