The cornerstones of BRIGITTE KOWANZ's work are the representation of light, its use to create space and its informative content. Her œuvre comprises no strictly separated groups of works; rather, over the years she has frequently reverted to earlier light sources, techniques, forms and formulations and developed them further. The works Morse Alphabet and Connect the Dots are examples of this practice.

Morse Alphabet (1998) harks back to her early work. Each of the 26 black-painted neon tubes arranged in a circle shows a letter of the Morse code. Ever since the 1990s, the artist has been fascinated by the fact that all the letters of the alphabet, as well as the numbers 0 to 9, can be represented using only long and short signals. The Morse code, as an early binary form of communication, is the basis for the digital age.

The title Connect the Dots is a quote from Apple-founder Steve Jobs' Commencement address at Stanford University in 2005. According to Jobs, on the way to fnding what you love – whether in your professional or your private life – you will pass various points/events, which can be connected only in retrospect.: “[...] you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you of the well- worn path... and that will make all the difference.” Connect the Dots (2018) refers formally to the early work Morse Alphabet: the gaps in the strawberry-red lacquer on the 14 vertical, serially arranged LED acrylic glass tubes represent, in Morse code, each of the letters of the title of the work.

Brigitte Kowanz