Messages in Code
My recent painting series, entitled Posts, connotes messages fixed into space that stay still while the message and viewer continue to move. The paintings on canvas are static points, but the meaning that passes through them is not.
Message of the Inmost Counsel is comprised of seventeen canvases arranged in dot-dash formation of Morse code, spelling BE LOVE. The message arrived during a visualization meditation, delivered by a “council” I convene for guidance: friends, mentors, ancestors, my soul self, and higher power. Following a practice shared by Dr. Lisa Miller, author of The Awakened Brain, I ask each attendant what they need me to know, then listen for what arises. What landed, that day, were those two words.
I learned later that BE LOVE had also been formally launched in 2021 by Dr. Bernice A. King and The King Center as a global mandate for justice. I had received, without knowing it, something already in transmission for an organized purpose. I’ve let this convergence stay open, as a way to reflect the relationship between individual and collective.
Morse code travels with its own complications, developed by a man whose racism stood in direct contradiction to the message his system helped carry in the transmission of this painting. I think about how we send messages through infrastructure we didn’t design. For now, the paintings hold that awareness without resolution, except as a reminder of the agency we have to choose and arrange language with care.
In my first Morse code translation, I didn’t realize the space between words requires its own distinct marking. The Medium Gap paintings depict the dots and dashes that denote space between words. They acknowledge how the omission expanded the meaning of the first translated message: BE LOVE with the intended space is a directive, yet without the space becomes BELOVE, which to me lands as beloved, a term of endearment. The space of the medium gap stands on its own as a moment of clarity, a pause that is itself a signal.
To me, the coded paintings are an invitation to engage for awhile: to slowly track the details of the dot-dash line that form the composition, contemplate, and feel the communication that passes through. The viewer’s experience in this mode of awareness mirrors the process in which they were made. It draws a connection to my actions as the transmitter, and to the source of the message itself.
