I’ve been studying glyphs lately. All kinds of them: petroglyphs, hieroglyphics, and Mayan glyphs in particular. I’m intrigued by their varying structures and ways particular symbols are assembled in a format to generate meaning, an idea or a word. How do you create meaning? Or, how do you find meaning in today’s world? That’s a broader question I’ve been asking myself as we are incessantly surrounded by streaming video, social media, conflicting politics, and the noisy demands of consumerist culture.
The phenomenon of fake news and real fake video is tearing down trust and access to facts and hard earned knowledge in everything from science and medicine to written history. Looking at the beauty of Mayan glyphs, each one presenting a collection of individual picture symbols, all in a unified, compact form, I’m drawn to how apparently random the picture symbols seem. Each of them or a combination of them denote phonetics completing the full word, represented by the glyph. It’s this initial randomness of picture symbols, conspiring to form words, meaning, that fascinated me.
Perhaps, the letters forming words of any language may look random to someone who is not fluent in that language. I wanted to begin exploring this idea of random but distinct images combined singularly in a work, that might convey new meaning or the impression of one.
The global pandemic has generated real distrust in federal governments for their lack of foresight, empathy or concern for the real gravity of the disease’s spread and destruction, especially in the US. I had come across news articles that have tallied the oft-repeated catch phrases of POTUS: Trumpisms. One I liked for it’s cliched irony - ‘believe me’ - had echoed so many distrusted politicians in the past. This phrase served as imagery for this piece, also called ‘Believe Me’. I had been put on furlough from my job as a result of the spread of COVID-19 back in mid-March, and suddenly the country was made aware of the glaring importance of washing your hands, social distancing and wearing masks.
I felt I wanted to use an image of my hand as part of the piece, and to push the exploration of making my own Mayan glyph. The orange painted circular forms came from looking at data visualization graphics, depicting the spread of COVID cases in this country and the planet. The back and forth process of of building up the layers of collage and subtracting from it through the ripping, tearing and cutting into the surface, continues to evolve. It’s an evolution of process, influenced by archaeology, seeded years ago by studying fossils of ancient life, revealed through layers of sediment.