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Jimmy Luu Trained as a graphic designer, I employ the methods and formal vocabulary of graphic design to explore how the fluidity of language and meaning contrasts strongly against the fixity of letterforms. My creative research explores ways in which letterforms may be experienced beyond the two dimensional plane. I seek to understand the nature of text in relation to the body, time, space and material. Using shifts in scale, material and site, my work affects experiences of language beyond the visual. My current work engages text in architectural, filmic and urban spaces. LETTERSCAPE is a public artwork that engages the condition of human growth and potential by allowing the viewer to inhabit letterforms at a large scale in relation to the land. The word ONWARD is spelled out in 30-foot-wide letters, which are inlaid in the courtyard of Austin’s Health and Human Services building. Each letterform is circumscribed by metal landscape edging, and is seeded with a contrasting turf. The edges of the letters at the beginning of the word peel upward from the land, reaching a height of six feet at their peak. The elevated parts of the peeled letterforms are supported by a metal structure, and the ground below the peeled letter has been left raw. A planted line pattern starts before the O and winds through the courtyard, extending outward to the edge of the site. The size of each arc in the line is proportional to the population of Austin by decade since 1903--the first year the Office of Vital Records began to keep official birth records. The scale of the letters is intentionally too large for a single viewer to see the entire letter or word at once from up close at ground level. Rather, one experiences the letter either as a path or an inhabitable object. |
