Sue Johnson explains The Alternate Encyclopedia:

“By investigating the history of picturing nature, The Alternate Encyclopedia zeros in on the critical role printmaking, publishing, and the artist have played in the dissemination and articulation of knowledge, and at the same time attempts to underscore the inherent fiction in all visual images and the mutability of truth. In the case of the encyclopedia as form, it may only be only now in our post-modern times that we humans recognize the futility and impossibility of creating comprehensive and systematic records of knowledge. The historical record is marked by shifting and changing ‘facts’ – outdated, updated, discredited, mistaken, errors in printing, lost and recovered manuscripts, and from one expert to the next, the record showcases differing opinions about natural, historical, cultural, and economic events. In some ways I see the record of history as multifarious, something akin to a huge, awkward, unsteady wad of stuff, a conglomerate rock formed by the idiosyncratic compression of disparate elements at the hands of untamed and perhaps chaotic natural and cultural forces. Like a cross-section diagram, my hope is that the project begins to excavate and expose the vast layers of information that are stacking up like dirty dishes in the sink of culture.”