The Secret Language: Glyphs, Signs and Portents

"The Secret Language" explores the beauty and aura of significance of The Sign—the archetypal mark, conceived by the mind, written or drawn by the hand, and naming a chunk of reality as a discrete Thing— that is an essential part of the human ability to think abstractly.

The Sign is younger than The Word—the spoken utterance came first—but in its ability to capture meaning without recourse to memory, it allowed a vast enlargement of our conceptual world.

Not all humans have written language, but those that didn't still had pictorial shortcuts to meaning: pictograms, symbols, glyphs...something that referred to something else, that meant something extra, in context.

In the "The Secret Language," I have freely improvised on the theme of the sign—not consciously copying from any particular system, but borrowing from all. The alphabet of The Secret Language is all letters, all characters, and none. Any literal meaning is inadvertent. In keeping with the nature of Signs as divinatory tools, I welcome any unintentional hilarity, from Runic, Arabic, Cyrillic or other fragment, should there be any.

"We think it means something." That is what fictitious UFO researcher Lacombe said upon studying the apparent significance of patterns he had discerned, in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Indeed It does mean Something. It always does, but what?

That question, gallery-goer, must be answered by you.