The Language of Color

Sherrie Gallerie
January 18–February 28, 2009

Artist Statement

In my newest body of work, I focus on the semiotic nature of color by using acolor alphabet system, which I have developed. This system uses pure color to mimic the function of letters (glyphs) to hold language and forms the basic foundation for many of the experimental works that I have produced.

These works range from a “Mating Jacket,” a brightly colored dinner jacket composed of dozens of colored-sentences of male oriented come-ons, pick up lines, slogans, and macho self promotions to an artist book, in which I developed a system of written glyphs to translate Wittgenstein’s text “Remarks on Colour” into pure color.

This color system of writing has also informed many of my other recent works. In the Forgotten Children, a series of photorealistic grayscale portraits of young children composed of tens of thousands of individually stacked crayons-tips, the color-alphabet crayons are used to spell out hundreds of children names within each of the individual panels. The Pangram series uses holoalphabetic sentences (pangrams) in conjunction with the color-alphabet to produce a set of colorful abstract encaustic works.