Objects On My Dresser, Phase 1: Pictorial Linguistics was the first phase of this extensive project. It was exhibited at the alternative art space Franklin Furnace, New York, in 1979.

Building on earlier works such as Bonito Rapoport Shoes (1978), where Rapoport used computer programming to tabulate and visualize data about her everyday life, Pictorial Linguistics explored the physical and relational properties of the objects on her dresser. It featured an extensive series of drawings on computer printout paper with plotter printed data visualizations, solvent transfer images, collage, colored pencil, and typewriter annotations.

The first set of public presentations of the coding and processing work set off by psychoanalysis and Rapoport’s initial foray into computer programming were essentially self-portraits. Rapoport eagerly revealed her methods, displaying the process of object coding and disclosing the details of her conversations with Winifred De Vos, which touched on intimate matters usually concealed within a psychoanalyst’s office.

- From Sonya Rapoport: Objects on My Dresser (2022), by Alla Efimova and Terri Cohn

Rapoport matched each of the objects on her dresser with a descriptive word, and a “correlative object”. For example, a gestural drawing by artist Nancy Genn was matched with the word “snakey” [sic], which was then correlated with a found image of sea snakes. These word/image correlations are a central feature of all subsequent phases of Objects On My Dresser. They are a sort of personal matrix, a system Rapoport used to discover truths about her own psyche.

In reevaluating a personal random set by a technological system, the artist discovered laws of her own behavior patterns. The format includes computer forms and plots – ritualistic symbols of our technological age.

- From Pictorial Linguistics Statement, Franklin Furnace, 1979