Phonic Slices (installation, rubbings, and bookwork)
by Nobuo Kubota

By randomly gluing pre-cut wooden letters into a rectilinear box-form, Nobuo Kubota constructed a sculptural work that he calls a "phonic loaf". He then sawed the loaf-like object into slices, thus exposing the materiality and plasticity of the alphabetic signs as they existed in a chance operation with three dimensional space. The slicing of the phonic loaf not only revealed the physical and sculptural qualities of the letters but yielded a sequence of sculptural slices that are visual poems and optophonetic sound scores in their own right. The exposed letters as forms, remnants, and particles, complete in themselves, assumed iconographic value - not conveying semantic import, but physically manifesting poetic language and performative sonics.

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