With Stutter and Spill, Drew Bacon celebrates the alphabet as the essential building block of language. His video montage uses a 1912 edition of Webster’s Dictionary to explore the increasing obsolescence of print media in the digital era. At the same time, by deconstructing this century-old resource, Bacon underscores how meaning can become fluid in the rapid evolution of both the spoken and written word.

Bacon was born in Houston in 1989 and created Stutter and Spill during his final year at New York’s Pratt Institute. Through a meticulous and labor-intensive process, he stenciled letters on each page of the dictionary, stringing the images together in a motion-graphics software program. Beginning with a straightforward treatment of the letter A—moving it across the pages from left to right—he then complicated the progress of each letter, so that the alphabet comes to life in a dancing mosaic, stuttering and spilling across the gallery wall.

“I like to create this tension between a physical work and a work that’s made of robots and pixels,” Bacon explains. “That dual processing is like the way we live. . . . I consider it a continuum.”

► A Conversation with the Artist
Prompted by the installation of Stutter and Spill in Cullinan Hall and Drew Bacon’s upcoming completion of his master’s degree in experimental animation at California Institute of the Arts, curatorial assistant Katie O’Hara talked to the artist about his process.

Drew Bacon: Stutter and Spill | March 24–April 18, 2021

• Included with general admission. Advance timed tickets recommended.