melitzah
Risa Horowitz
June 14 – July 13, 2002
Opening & Talk: Friday, June 14 at 7:00pm
Artist Statement
My practice seems to be grounded in worry, repetition, compulsion and endurance. My most recent and current projects revolve around a very systematic approach to materials and my desire to collect, amass, and archive.
melitzah is defined by the process of creating it. The work deals with the polysemic nature of language, interpersonal communication, and personal discipline. melitzah hovers between a set of personal questions about legibility, interpretation, expression and understanding, and a semi lexicographic archival enterprise.
melitzah [the Hebrew word meaning utterance: an uninterrupted chain of spoken or written words not necessarily corresponding to a single or complete grammatical unit] is comprised of an audio recording of my voice reading the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, and a visual archive containing the waveforms for the words of the dictionary. I am curious about the waveforms as visual representations of the auditory, which are linguistic representations of the cognitive. melitzah presents an empirically more accurate visual representation of the English language which is nonetheless illegible, thus making analogous the failures of everyday communication with the abstraction of language into waveform.
