Inspired by the first half of the top row on a keyboard, artist Pablo Gamboa Santos developed a series of 300 drawings, entitled Qwerty. He used an old typewriter to create layers of overlapping letters which interact directly with his detailed illustrations and function as either water or land depending on the scene.
Presented at the Centro De Arte Contemporneo in Quito last fall, the installation consisted of hundreds of pages arranged in a row along the wall. The connecting sheets produced an interlocking scene, one single work spanning almost 200 feet around the room.
From dark at the top to lighter at the bottom, the alphabet was used as a jumble of letters rather than organized into any meaningful words. “It is in this habitat where beings and associated graphic symbols build narratives to tell stories, report facts, narrate triumphs or tragedies, or just be present or absent. All this happens simultaneously, as in ‘reality’: a world where everything happens at once,” explains Santos.
