An Unfamiliar Character with an Unknown Accent, an abstract artwork resembling a hybrid s and n with a double acute accent, rendered in oil stick and charcoal, evoking an alien alphabet symbol.

An Unfamiliar Character with an Unknown Accent

(Glyph Drawing No. 10)

Charcoal, oil stick and graphite on paper

19 x 24 inches

A typographic fragment — part s, part n, topped by a double acute accent — hovers between language and abstraction. The process of applying oil stick with a brayer and dusting with powdered charcoal has been refined to yield a delicate, controlled surface, existing somewhere between drawing and printmaking, graphic mark and fine art gesture. The resemblance to typography underscores this tension: the form could belong to an “alien” alphabet, a character without assigned meaning yet open to projection.

The title plays with this ambiguity — tongue-in-cheek but pointed. The work asks whether our first reading of the unfamiliar is about the thing itself or about us. Do we meet what we do not recognize on its own terms, or as a reflection of our own cultural anxieties? Which insecurities does it awaken, and how do those shape our treatment of what — or whom — we perceive as “foreign”?

The drawing mounted on a pegboard wall in a studio setting, shown in a wide shot to provide scale.
Extreme close-up of the drawing’s surface, showing the velvety black charcoal layer with crisp white cut-ins of untouched paper, along with faint graphite grid lines that hint at the underlying structure.