One summer while camping on Prince Edward Island, my brother, our beagle, and six-year old me wondered away from our parents to explore a playground. As we pushed our unwitting pet down the slide, a man in a floppy hat walked over and photographed us as we gladly posed, grinning ear to ear. It wasn’t until we returned home and my mom began pasting the vacation photos into the family album that I realized that the man in the floppy hat had been my dad. I was startled by my failure to recognize him. Confused by what felt like mutiny of my mind, I tried to reconstruct the memory with the new information in front of me, yet somehow the man remained a stranger in my past even though my present so clearly told me otherwise.
In Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa deals with the fallibility of memory through the presentation of vastly different perceptions of one event from an assortment of witnesses. But what if all those different perceptions exist in one person’s mind creating a sort of kaleidoscope of varying emotion-warped lenses? My work aims to reconcile conflicting and intertwining perceptions of reality by “cleansing the doors of perception.” On his quest for truth—which he discovered to be infinity—Aldous Huxley opted for peyote as his means of altering how he saw the world. I choose a piece of aluminized mylar, a camera, and paint.
I create paintings in much the same way I create memories. My own perception of events, whether they are warped by temporal distance and emotional contexts or by tools of distortion I set up for myself in my studio, are tested by photographic evidence. Using photo-transfer as one of my drawing tools, I build scenarios that involve distorted and intertwined figures and landscapes. Through a process of adding and subtracting, clarifying and muddying, I rework the pieces until they read quickly enough to be seen and slowly enough to be looked at. The resulting images use the vocabulary of photography, film, sculpture, and painting to test the way the mind processes an image—naming, categorizing and connecting pieces in order to make overall sense of what it’s seeing. Through the manipulation of perception, both my own and the viewers, I test the relationship between cognition and feeling—the Deleuzeian Logic of Sensation. Francis Bacon explains that “an illustrative form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrative form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact . . . Facts themselves are ambiguous, appearances are ambiguous, and therefore this way of recording is nearer to the fact by its ambiguity of recording.” The moments of confusion between the paintings’ recognizable parts create space for the viewer’s own ambiguous facts to seep into the work and evoke a personalized emotive response. Hopefully, in that response is a moment of truth, a feeling clearer than memory.
