Deborah Mersky’s Alphabet Eyes is a found book that has been extensively altered through paint, cutting, pasting and the addition of such things as glass, copper wire and surprisingly, painted fruit pits.
Judging from the antique cover alone, the book appears to be an old and worn liturgical volume of some vintage. The original embossed title has been worked over with copper-colored paint to look like the letters of some strange and broken alphabet. A closer look reveals the original title Riches, of what turns out to be a religious treatise by J.F. Rutherford, published in 1936 by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. In the center of the book is a dusty yellow and ungainly diamond shape cut directly through the cover and fairly deep into the pages. Through this cloudy portal one can make out a brief passage of text. Opened, the book sets an entirely different tone. Gone is the sober religious inflection of the cover, replaced by a roughly painted, |
pasted, cut and assembled interior. To the left are fragments of text – sometimes just a solitary letter – appearing within what might be tiny hieroglyphic shapes that have been cut into painted squares stacked askew in an irregular checkerboard pattern. On the right-hand page more off-kilter squares contain additional words and phrases – “Jehovah,” “Baal” and “Lord God.” Then comes the denouement when the punning title comes storming in: within the niches are three-dimensional “eyeballs” fashioned by painting the aforementioned fruit pits. With these wild, staring orbs riveting our attention and that title pun firmly in mind, we can hardly take this as serious religious commentary. Rather, such unrestrained and scraggy visual clues more likely would lead one to see this as a planned collision of traditional orthodoxy with a modern mind contemplating such things as spirituality, omniscience, prophesy and perhaps even that favored mystical notion of the Middle Ages, the “third eye” – the eye of the soul.
Alphabet Eyes
Deborah Mersky |
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Since the time of ancient civilization, humans have used diagrams and charts to explain the world around them. Some of the earliest known inscriptions are depictions of planetary alignments and seasonal cycles. The 19th century version of the now updated and well-recognized periodic table of elements is a system that charts the chemical composition of metals, earths, gases and other components that make up all existing matter. In his book A Short History of Everything, Bill Bryson describes the periodic table as “a thing of beauty in the abstract.” With the advent of modern art the periodic table has taken on new aesthetic qualities as an abstract object and as fodder for graphic visual content.
In Biography Sarah Bryant treats this familiar scientific diagram as a visual code that allows a comparison between the chemical elements that make up the human body and the often overlapping chemical components of the physical world. For instance, sodium, magnesium, and potassium appear in varying amounts in the human body, the earth’s crust, and seawater. Bryant has assigned a specific colored rectangle to each element: cerulean blue for hydrogen, pink for sodium, and so on. |
On a two-page spread that depicts the elements in the human body, the rectangles symbolizing those elements correspond exactly with their placement on the actual table. The more abundant the element, the more intense the color, with pale colors signifying a chemical in lesser quantities. This color coding also adds to the important overall aesthetic effect of the book, creating compelling spatial and color relationships.
In another spread, a diagrammatic rendering of the earth’s crust is accompanied by a row of colored rectangles that follows the upper quarter of the earth’s arc and, in the process, visually completes what is an arresting asymmetrical image. Visual effects are more forcefully brought to the fore in other images that edge closer to abstraction, such as the one shown here. The field of rectangles now delicately overlays velutinous, organic shapes that seem to exist subliminally behind a page-filling grid. Even though the viewer has deciphered the code, the added aesthetic complications have made the message more complex.
Biography
Sarah Bryant |
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