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Jasper Johns once explained that his imagery — e.g. targets, flags, numbers — were derived from “things the mind already knows”. By presenting common symbols in a new context he liberated them from their predictable meaning. Johns was standing on the shoulders of Marcel Duchamp who had redefined the process of creation through his readymades, the beginning of conceptual art.

Even as a young artist I sought to invest images that I fished out of the sea of consumerism with spiritual and emotional power through a similar process of re-contextualization. I collected and categorized visual detritus from various sources —magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, matchbooks, candy wrappers — and filed them for future use. The collection grew quite large, but there were a few that went into a special folder titled “Solid Gold”. These were the ones I would turn to again and again over the years, establishing them as evolving parts of a visual/linguistic sign language.

Eventually text became a key element in my work, finally including my poetry to take meaning to a new dimension. I wanted my artistic expression to exist as a new kind of illustrated manuscript, so that the poems and images bore equal significance. Moreover, I sought to find a way to integrate the textual element so that it served a compositional purpose as much as it informed the content.

My current work explores our understanding of reality and illusion, and how habit, expectation and inference determine how and what we see. My assumption is that perception is only a projection, and we are seeing our filters. This defies the sense that there is an objective reality which exists outside ourselves. Revealing this conceptional perspective is one of my goals as an artist.

In challenging assumptions of reality, I have tried to illustrate fundamental perceptual illusions and simulations of time and space. In “Scrimshaw” an event is represented as occurring both in the present and in the past, while another event occurring in the future is storyboarded in the present. In “Charge” we are confronted with a perspective that simultaneously recedes away and advances towards us. This confounding of space and time can be liberating as we are freed then to consider ourselves and our world in a new light. I am fascinated by representations of early animations such as zoetropes, which display a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of motion; as well as mid-20th century representations of 3D comics which resolved using colored lenses. There is something absurd and reductionist about seeing historical representations of these “novelties”, but it forces the viewer to question our hubris in not considering contemporary sophistication of advanced technical digital capabilities (AI, CGI), which are still simulations—making our ability to perceive reality next to impossible.

I have sought in all this work to explore whether it is possible to ultimately know reality. In the spirit of this quest I ask the viewer to pose these questions for themselves.

 

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