elemenoh, 2005

Saranac Art Project

Spokane, WA
15 feet x 25 feet x 30 feet

mixed media installation

While I read this book I painted out the text for as long as I could focus only on what I was reading. Each time I encountered an interruption I would generate the next color by rolling dice and choose the corresponding color in my palette. In this way I had been generating a number of process/ritual based objects. These projects were a 30-inch ball of yarn I had wrapped and a dead tree I had been wrapping and tying strings to the ends of it’s branches. These, attention based, exercises were as much meditations as they were art objects. It was my desire to see if arranging them in the context of the gallery I could make a work that tied these abstractions of my actions together as a three dimensional drawing in space. In working on this piece I realized that many of my choices are derived from curiosity about abstraction. As when I was small and I couldn’t find my initials in the alphabet. I had been focusing so deliberately on the sounds I had converted the letters L-M-N and O into a single letter called elemenoh. When on autopilot saying the memorized alphabet my letters were nowhere to be found. This work stands as a poem or abstraction about wanderings within meaning and syntax.