Two years ago, while texting her son — an undergraduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. — Sandra Doore found she wasn’t getting her message through.
Sometimes, he would understand her line of thought. Most often, not.
Because of the ongoing miscommunication, the Victoria visual artist was forced to make her comments painfully clear so her son didn’t think she was mad at him.
She employed emoji symbols “so he would know I meant well and everything was received positively,” she said.
Soon, Doore was digging into this brave new world of text language. She uncovered a list of acronyms online — 42 pages of them such as LOL and LMAO — “most of which I had never heard of,” she laughed. “There was an absurdity to it.”
Quickly, the list became an inspiration for a new exhibit, which will be shown this summer at Port Coquitlam’s Leigh Square Community Arts Village.
The display, she said, is one which tries to interpret how texting affects our daily lives and how the landscape is evolving to become more digitally focused.
The texting language “is something that we need to try to come to terms with, especially for younger people,” she said. “We don’t need to get so upset anymore when people type ‘U’ rather than ‘You.’ It’s becoming real.”
Though Doore primarily works with sculptural forms, she chose paper, oil sticks and collage as her media for this exhibit. She created about 140 pieces, many of which have multiple segments that can stand alone; however, they make for a bigger picture image when displayed together, she said.
So far, her pieces have only been shown once publicly, at the Kimball Art Center's Badami Gallery in Park City in Utah — a smaller venue than Leigh Square.
Doore chuckles when she talks about the name of her exhibit, Lost in Translation… “I like the ellipsis because they’re indicative of my ongoing efforts to investigate texting," she said. “They also allude to the absurdity to watch the three dots appear and disappear while we are waiting for texted responses.
"In the show, they’re a kind of visual synthesizer about the time and space in between.”
• Lost in Translation… by Sandra Doore opens Saturday at 2 p.m. in the Leigh Square Community Arts Village (beside PoCo city hall). The show runs until Aug. 17.
