Using the literal meaning of an encyclopedia (a systematically arranged work containing exhaustive and factual information on a branch of knowledge or art) as a starting point, I focus both globally and locally on the political and cultural influences that construct modern perceptions of knowledge. Encyclopedia encompasses the mythologies of history, science and art in their corresponding public institutions and how these concepts and ideas are mediated for consumption in the public sphere.
However, Encyclopedia is more than an exploration of hegemonic visuality (the assumption that all displays/presentations are complicit in serving the political/ethical systems of any authority). It is also a treatise on photological knowledge (the framing of multiple narratives that comprise the historical, political, cultural, scientific and ethical tropes of a nation through physical and constructed visual images and displays which are used along with all its myths, symbols and memories).
In the course of my re-presentation of this public culture of knowledge and art, questions of objectivity and of purpose reemerge, duplicating the same problems inherent in creating public culture. Selection, style, chance, the personal and the political all compete in the process of its compilation.
