American Alphabet is a project more than twenty years in the making. Cottingham’s 26 letters are a collection, salvaged from a variety of mid-century American commercial signs; most are neon, a handful are molded plastic.Cottingham describes them as “portraits of odd, colorful characters I found hanging out downtown.”
Dutch artist Annesas Appel is in the process of re-envisioning the covers of the 429 books that comprise her personal library. In one project she is organizing them according to color and in the other by the letters in their titles.
Christiane Baumgartner is that unique figure, a primary printmaker with an international and substantial reputation in contemporary art. British artist and scholar Paul Coldwell discusses Baumgartner’s woodcuts, videos, and her visceral enactment of surveillance.
Carolyn Thompson, whose work is largely concerned with the visual presentation of text, has taken Truman Capote’s short story “Music for Chameleons” and blacked out everything with the exception of rectangles where a colour has been referenced in the story, offering windows of coloured light in an otherwise black void. Black Mirror encourages the private one-to-one intimate engagement of handling and turning each sheet in turn, a metaphor itself for the fragility of existence.
