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Mark of Wonder
11.3.2020 - Print Design for ART 105: Digital Studio
Mystery is scarce in the digital era.
Awe—that emotion of the unknowable, of great mountains and dark oceans and deep space—fades when we can be anywhere and know anything at any time. It’s all a Google search away.
The poet Milton writes of “glory obscured,” and the philosopher Edmund Burke imagines a “morning star in the midst of a cloud,” but my phone parts the clouds.
It shows me the precise shape of the star and its flames, the character of its atoms, where it was yesterday, how it will appear tomorrow. And then I keep scrolling. Glory consumed.
Mark of Wonder, inspired by the work of Mark Tansey and M.C. Escher, seeks to deconstruct this idolization of knowledge. American culture celebrates
Enlightenment-era ideals of dispassionate logic through the neoclassical architecture that makes up our capitols and banks.
Pristine marble forms seem to be the language of high-minded rationality. To unravel a marble form is to question the triumph of reason over heart. I think there is beauty in that which exists beyond reason. Sunbeams on a forest floor, a dog’s curious eyes—in this print, I try to visualize the unexplainable wonder and awe that color life’s most enchanting moments.
Mark of Wonder was printed on an A3 sheet of 47lb. Red River Premium Matte. Type is set in Gza & Andale Mono.
To create “Marble Mark,” I merged a portrait of Judeo-Claudian emperor Caligula with a publically available headshot of Mark Zuckerberg. Caligula’s portrait is currently on view in the Met 5th Avenue in Gallery 162 and can be seen here.
Mark Tansey, The Forward Retreat (1986). Oil on canvas. Learn more here.
With signature dry humor, Mark Tansey’s 1986 painting The Forward Retreat wrestles with perception, reason, and the potency of our past. Its surreal imagery and poignant message are referenced through the seal of a fictional secret society on the left of Mark of Wonder.
Future site of the Clock of the Long Now, photographed by the Long Now Foundation. Learn more here.
On the right side of Mark of Wonder, viewers can follow cartesian coordinates to Mt. Washington in Nevada, the future site of the under-construction Clock of the Long Now. First imagined by the engineer Danny Hills, also in 1986, the massive mechanical clock is designed to run for 10,000 years. Two hands tick on the year and the century, while a cuckoo emerges every millennium. The clock can be understood as a meditation on the passage of time, the brevity of life, and the consequent significance of every second. As Stewart Brand put it, the contraption might “do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment.”
