Joanna Rogers | The Chorus
Craft Council of BC 1386 Cartwright Street, Granville Island, British Columbia V6H 3R8
Johanna Rogers, "The Chorus"
Courtesy of the Artist.
Joanna Rogers', The Chorus, consists of a series of weavings, each containing their own Morse code message. The weavings create an abstracted Analytical Engine programmed to transform the past into the present and to translate the future into cryptic Cassandrian prophesies.
The weavings—approximately 15 feet in length—hang down like banners or scrolls pooling onto plinths, resembling sunlight streaming through stained glass windows. Visually, they represent the Chorus in a Greek tragedy, providing a repetitious running commentary on the fate of our endangered species and, ultimately, on ourselves.
Using a traditional summer and winter weaving patterns to create the Morse code messages, they can be read both horizontally and vertically. The summer and winter patterns are made by blocks of contrasting colours, remarkably translating Morse code into a pattern. Within each weaving, the message is repeated as if this repetition might make it clearer. However, most of us cannot decipher Morse code and even if we could, without a cipher to the weavings the messages are lost to us—as will be our endangered species.