The Completion of My Secret Decoder Ring

The series is complete now and if you look in the gallery the images might line up in a way that forms a game of Tic Tac Toe (depending on your device).  In fact, the series could be hung on a wall and, once in a while, moved around in the process of playing a game. Tic Tac Toe might not be the most engaging game once you get to the point where you realize it should always end a tie.  However, transformed into a vehicle to play with the arrangement of art, I hoped to breath new life into the game and the art. After all, most people don’t want to look at images that long…and they usually don’t want to play with them either, especially in a gallery.  That doesn’t bother me--it’s a matter of time and place.  But I think if someone had these images in their home on a wall, once in a while they would play Tic Tac Toe to rearrange them. In fact, knowing that was my intent for the work, they might even feel obligated to do so every now and then.  Thus, the creation of playable art!
 
This series continues to explore themes related to playfulness and/or seriousness. As mentioned previously, the images combine ludicrous representations of food and water with the relatively serious concept and form of a Mandala….and it’s all set out on my kitchen floor!  However, this work is also about codes, text, and communication within art.  Each week I made three more images and each set of three had a different message printed in the Wingdings font around the Border.  The viewer could spend some time trying to figure out the meaning…but of course they usually will not, and that’s the point. The text is in Wingdings so that it will not be read. It is an unknown, but the viewer is aware that it means something, and that adds to the mystery and potential of the image, which is much better than simply reading something. 
 
Furthermore, Tic Tac Toe is interesting because it uses text but not as words.  I am often tempted to put text into images and I usually manage to restrain myself…after all, to me it feels a bit like cheating.  But the X’s and O’s in Tic Tac Toe are game pieces and are removed from their alphabetical function and other communicative considerations (e.g. hugs and kisses).  The reason text can be so precarious in an image is that the inclusion of text, on or near a photograph, can significantly alter one’s interpretation of the image. 
 
Nevertheless, there is a rich tradition of using text in modern art. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were two of the first modern artists to include text within their images. During the period of synthetic cubism, they would often paste the word, “Jou” into their collages. They typically clipped out the letters from the word “Journal.” The French word “Jou,” translated into English, means Play. I find that particularly interesting. Also consider Rene Magritte’s, The Treachery of Images (the image of a pipe with the words “this is not a pipe” written in French underneath). Magritte was reminding us of how difficult it is for us not to think of images as the things they represent.  This is because we are so focused on the act of communicating that when someone lifts the veil on the system of communication, exposing its workings (as many post-modernists have done), it can be a little disorienting.  
 
In terms of systems of communication, I find photographs with text in them particularly interesting. A photo with text in it includes all three types of signs defined by Charles Sanders Peirce.  Text is symbolic, because it has no visual relation to its meaning.  The images in the photo are iconic, because they look like what they represent.  Photographs in general are indexical, because they are caused by what they show. So, I think it’s fair to say that the use of text brings a variety of concerns to a photograph, and in this series, I tried to play around with some of those issues.