LILY PRILLINGER

Revelations, 2006
Drawings on Braille Paper (pages of "Book of Revelation" from the Braille version of the King James Bible), ongoing series.

The drawing series, Revelations, is a satirical allegory about the personal pursuit of knowledge, or 'vision', which is, in turn, fundamentally undermined by nescient blindness. Generally speaking, this series is concerned with the inherent problems of perception. Each page from this ongoing series consists of a rudimentary technical drawing that has been sketched over the raised surface of a page from the Braille version of the Book of Revelation, (the last canonical book of the New Testament in the Bible.) Most of the drawings, and their subject matter, are reproductions from entries in The Golden Book Encyclopedia, (an old set of educational books intended for children.)

The drawings and their accompanying descriptions, once extracted from the colorful, jubilant context of the children's books, and re-enacted on the blank page of the Braille text, felt lonely and barren. Rendered as separate 'revelations' on a page, the content of these drawings and their explanations of 'concepts' in the natural world are certain, broad and earnest -- but ultimately crude. I felt that this combination of conflicting properties could be applied to my own childlike understanding of the world. The more I become certain of arbitrary ideas and feelings, the more I reveal about my own essential ignorance. In this series of drawings, my ignorance is underscored, literally, by the pages and pages of 'prophetic' text, that are fundamentally inaccessible since I cannot actually read it. My literacy is bound to -- and bound by -- my illiteracy. Ironically, my sense of sight prohibited me from seeing what a Braille-literate blind person could know by touch. Similarly, a blind reading of these pages would access the Braille text, Book of Revelation, yet the drawn 'revelations' would be hidden. This duplicitous function raised some rhetorical questions: What part of knowing is unknowing? Is that which is left 'unrevealed' by a revelation, a revelation in itself?

I selected the apocalyptic literature of the Book of Revelation to be the underlying material for my drawings because I felt that it thematically resonated with the absurdity dilemma of this project. The definition of "apocalypse" is derived from a Greek word that basically means "revelation", or rather, "an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling" (Richard Goswiller, Revelation, Pacific Study Series, Melbourne, 1987.) It is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the mass of humankind. In some part, I felt that the Braille text operated like a continual hidden revelation, unwinding within the minor revelatory nature of the encyclopedic drawings - and yet, all the while, the two processes are unknown to each other.

In one way, it seems that the revelations posed by the drawings are part of a larger, formal study of the natural world; being or existence as well as the basic categories thereof---the encyclopedic drawings present information about various entities, and function primarily on an ontological level. The revelation posed by the Braille text, however, presents prophetic beliefs concerning final events and ultimate purposes of the Apocalypse, or what is commonly regarded as the "end of the world." The Book of Revelation, with its metaphoric Christian prophecies is primarily eschatological in nature (literally a study of the eschaton: the times of the end, last things, or end times.) Just as the drawings assert meaning, or "give life" to the objects they are describing, the apocalyptic passages beneath them, bring their life to an end. While the drawings are primarily concerned with objecthood, the paper on which they are drawn imbues an entirely different sense of substance to the images at hand. Because of this, the drawings become something other than crude technical sketches. For me, the drawings on Braille demonstrate a bungled philosophy: two strains of 'revelation' bundled together: (ontological and eschatological respectively), which are simultaneously visible and invisible, existent and non-existent…

(When it is clear that there will always be fundamental problems with perception, one must take excessive joy in the paradoxes!)