Aa–Zy
by Sophie Dvořák
Sophie Dvořák leafed and combed through thousands of pages for her work Aa–Zy. Hundreds of images, illustrations, and photos were selected from lexica of the past hundred years and cut out with great precision. For each respective decade of the 20th century she chose a German-language encyclopedia and extracted the image material from their volumes, which then served as the basis for the ten series of letters from A to Z with a total of 272 collages.
Following an intuitive system, the artist reassembled the visual fragments with a playfully elegant aesthetic, creating works with a unique and powerful complexity.
(...)What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a,b,c,d) which links each of those categories to all the others. Moreover, it is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here. We are familiar with the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own(...) (The Order of Things, Foucault)
Following an intuitive system, the artist reassembled the visual fragments with a playfully elegant aesthetic, creating works with a unique and powerful complexity.
(...)What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a,b,c,d) which links each of those categories to all the others. Moreover, it is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here. We are familiar with the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own(...) (The Order of Things, Foucault)
| Tags | series, research |
| Technique | Graphic arts (Etching, collage...) |
