Repurposing Glyphs (2016 - ongoing)
These paintings use the visual languages of heraldry and symbolism as a kind of frame, within which I am employing glyphs taken from Greek and re-purposed within economics & finance math. I am quite captivated by escutcheon and other framing devices found in heraldic forms, mainly for their immediacy, endurance and availability to interpretation. Escutcheon were made to create identity, to protect wealth, and in this way, heraldic forms became synonymous with the protection of the valuation of honor, which
became inextricable from wealth. My aim is not to re-present heraldic and honorific images but to adopt the structure of this long-established visual language to access a critique of the
hyper-specialization of finance and economics. Statistics and finance math is a language that is largely inaccessible yet forms the basis for the financial models used to pressurize, cajole, and persuade decisions that propel capital, and create norms.
The moment of specialism, a token of modernism, has produced an environment where understanding is itself a form of property, precisely because the complexity grafted onto the glyph has become what we can think of as the contemporary arcane. This very process has been mirrored in art, and there is a critique available here too but it is important to remember that this process of encoding meaning is actually originally taken from art. Some of the very
first paintings were adorned with symbols that had great devotional meaning. Through such combinations of symbols more complex meanings were pronounced, and the complexities referred to earlier, finally found a form.
These paintings have been made with mostly found (repurposed) wood; most of them are approximately 36" sq- 48"sq.; and are made with acrylic paint, ink and various acrylic media.
