It Started with Aardvark
series of 26 screenprints, 24" x 22", 2012.
It Started with Aardvark is a series of twenty-six screenprints, one for each letter of the alphabet. It includes every illustration from the dictionary, with these images organized by letter. These screenprints do not portray the 3,100 dictionary illustrations as separate images as they are in the dictionary volume, but instead, overlap them in successive layers printed one on top of another so that they co-exist as one merged graphic icon, a hybrid of all visual knowledge. Because they were printed by hand and because the images were layered one after another, the surface of the print retains the individual outlines of each illustration like a sedimentary deposit. On average, each print has more than 100 layers, with letter S having the most with 392 illustrations and letter X having just 2.
It Started with Aardvark is a project is about the search for meaning. This series of prints shows what the accumulation of knowledge and the ideal of complete understanding can look like within this search for meaning, and how a viewer deciphers and makes sense of visual information in our image-saturated contemporary world.
