The Secret Language: Glyphs, Signs and Portents


July 12 to August 3, 2008
Reception July 12, noon to 10pm
Gallery 14
3960 60th Street, Sacramento, California 95820

The show has been held over until September 7. There will be an August Second Saturday reception on August 9, from 6 to 9 pm, and a closing reception in September. Stop by and enjoy the music, slideshow and hors d'oeuvres.

Click to read the Artist's Statement
Slideshow of Opening Night

“Curse of the (Jackson Pollock) Demon”

“Octaglyph: Union of Opposites”

“Octaglyph: Tribe of One ”

“Octaglyph: Señor Ojo”

“Octaglyph: No One Knows My Name”

“Octaglyph: The Fire Within”

“Octaglyph: Color of a Ghost”

“Octaglyph: Out of the Blue and Into the Black”

“Glyph Study”

“Glyph Study 2”

“Glyph Study: Ancient Treasures”

“Glyph Study: Blue Sensation”

“Glyph Study: Reading the Bones”

“Glyph Study: Confessions of a Mad Colorist”

“Glyph Study: Dancing Man”

“Glyph Study: Dancing Yellow”

“Glyph Study: Deep Blue”

“Glyph Study: Golden Horizon”

“Glyph Study: Leaving the Gray Alone”

“Glyph Study: In the Green Flame”

“Glyph Study: Green Gold”

“Glyph Study: Green Gold Two”

“Glyph Study: Green Meaning”

“Glyph Study: Green and Orange Don't Work...But Sometimes They Do”

“Glyph Study: Green Vibration”

“Glyph Study: Illumination”

“Glyph Study: Inescapable”

“Glyph Study: The Magic Chromatic”

“Glyph Study: The Magenta-Green Conclusion”

“Glyph Study: When You Use Mud, Be Sure to Make it Sing”

“Glyph Study: The Necessity of Gray”

“Glyph Study: No Literal Meaning”

“Glyph Study: Orange Pop, Maroon Harmony”

“Glyph Study: Orange Rococo”

“Glyph Study: Pterodactyl”

“Glyph Study: Sentence Fragment”

“Glyph Study: Sign of Z”

“Glyph Study: Silver Zed”

“Glyph Study: I Discovered the Song Within Me”

“Glyph Study: Thick and Thin”

“Glyph Study: Thrift Store Memory”

“Glyph Study: X, Y and Z--Orange Flame”
Artist's Statement

"The Secret Language" explores the beauty and aura of significance of The Sign—the archetypal mark, conceived by the mind, written or drawn by the hand, and naming a chunk of reality as a discrete Thing— that is an essential part of the human ability to think abstractly.

The Sign is younger than The Word—the spoken utterance came first—but in its ability to capture meaning without recourse to memory, it allowed a vast enlargement of our conceptual world.

Not all humans have written language, but those that didn't still had pictorial shortcuts to meaning: pictograms, symbols, glyphs...something that referred to something else, that meant something extra, in context.

In the "The Secret Language," I have freely improvised on the theme of the sign—not consciously copying from any particular system, but borrowing from all. The alphabet of The Secret Language is all letters, all characters, and none. Any literal meaning is inadvertent. In keeping with the nature of Signs as divinatory tools, I welcome any unintentional hilarity, from Runic, Arabic, Cyrillic or other fragment, should there be any.

"We think it means something." That is what fictitious UFO researcher Lacombe said upon studying the apparent significance of patterns he had discerned, in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Indeed It does mean Something. It always does, but what?

That question, gallery-goer, must be answered by you.

—Walter Rhoads, Sacramento, California, June 8, 2008