Glossed In Translation. 2003-06

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Glossed in Translation is a continuation of Alpha Beta/After Babel (2002–03) with a shift in emphasis from language to image. It is thematically centered around six handmade embroideries that adapt art-historical images and texts from sources as diverse as Nicolas Poussin, Francisco de Zurbarán, Lawrence Weiner, and Gerhard Richter. The patterns for the works were generated digitally and the embroideries themselves painstakingly made by hand. The principles and practices of making images are a subject of the work, and the ambiguities of image making are reflected in the double meanings, codes, and alternate readings that are embedded in the embroideries. Through juxtaposition, allusion, and reference, the work explores and exploits the ways meaning is constructed through image and language.

In Lexicon of Clouds, a selection of verses from the poem “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” by Wallace Stevens is paired with embroidered details of eight artists’ renderings of clouds. The poem is concerned with a kind of ecstatic representation, at once religious and erotic, linguistic and visual. My embroidered cloudscapes echo Stevens’s threading together of shifting meanings and associations in his romantic attempt to tie meaning to the ephemeral.

The 2006 exhibition Glossed in Translation, at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, included a version of the First Morse Message curtain (see Alpha Beta/After Babel) composed of four panels and expanded to fill a sixty-foot (18.3 meter) gallery wall, floor to ceiling.