Description of My Work

[Todd Camplin]

Signature: A handwritten signature of the subject (repeated and placed into patterns) and an audio recording of the subject saying his/her name, then edited on the computer and the printed on Dibond. My work is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s writings on naming and the signature. Derrida describes the signature as being an event or honest moment that happens without any forethought. Following from this description, I began exploring the signature as subject matter. I started with covering my apartment walls with my own signature, and then I had a friend write her signature on a wall as I documented the work. I began painting people's signatures, and finally I began creating the print series. The audio recording of the print also came from Derrida’s idea of "The Ear of the Other." We hear words, deconstruct the information and then we interpret what we hear. I record a person’s voice, the computer interprets the voice, and I print the image. The signature and the voice are like fingerprints. A portrait is a work of art that portrays an individual uniqueness. These works are portraits and thus they are named after the subject. Text: I take text and abstract the words in images. Sometimes I pull the text back out of the image. Other times I create texts that stay abstracts. I use words and phrases from popular media and from personal messages. I pick words at random from a dictionary and many times I pick words that have a personal meaning to me. Words have always been a mystery to me. I read some words backwards, I drop prefixes and suffixes to words when I am reading, plus I read a few letters backwards. I want to crack to code of words and at the same time help others experience text the way I perceive text, a mystified abstract.