Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a shift in the vocabulary that we absorb, process, and speak back into the world. The term “social distancing” and the parting words “stay safe,” among countless other idioms, quickly became familiar additions to our communal vocabulary to convey our lived experience. Sacred Texts engages this dialogue as an installation pairing popular pandemic phrases with vinyl-cut illuminations from Persian and British manuscripts to explore the way in which repetition can participate in both the generation and destruction of meaning. As each phrase is repeated throughout the installation, the letterforms increasingly break apart into fields of illegible markings. These dissolving characters prompt viewers to consider repetition itself as a medium and how this medium navigates the complexities of semantic satiation, in which repeated words lose their meaning, and the illusory truth effect, in which repeated statements construct and reinforce meaning.

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