ViSIBLE LANGUAGE

My lifelong dual interests in photography and writing are combined in my work. I have worked with small scale objects in a studio environment for most of my photographic work over the past decades.

Through several different series of photographic works, I have been visually investigating the photographic representation of the changing aura of language, its relationships with objects existing in real space, and now, in particular, in the series Visible Language, the mediation of language occurring through visual difference. Words, containing nuance within them and in combination, are further refined, presented, and interpreted through the visual presence of fonts and handwriting, as well as their physical and syntactic positions in relation to objects on the page. The materials upon which words reside, whether on the flat screen of a display, the curving surfaces of a scroll, or inside a document frame, further condition their receipt and the response.

I have been imaging word combinations that suggest to me a strong visual counterpart: sometimes they are ironic or seemingly incompatible, at times onomatopoeic or hyperbolic, but each combination interests me as a nuanced thought. I photograph small scale objects and text bits on various surfaces, altering their scale and positioning as I move them in layers into a final image, considering what they convey. For 8330 (notable minutiae), the thought that small details could exist in multiplicity, and that some could be worth attention while others were not, prompted the image.  

Gloria DeFilipps Brush

© 2010