Displaced Signs, 2012-2014

Oil on canvas mounted on panel

These paintings are based on the forms of capital letters used in writing the English language. The project began some years ago as an anthropomorphic alphabet. Over time the letters have become distilled into a lexicon of loosely recognizable abstract structures, a generative system, sometimes assembled into short words. A viewer might still intuit the presence of phonetic signs and even the residue of figures behind the abstract structures. In this group of paintings, the signs persist, like ghosts of themselves, often rotated sideways or upside down, letters more sensed than seen, hovering at the edge of peripheral vision, dissolving into the materiality of color, paint, surface, and eccentric spaces.