The Ideas

My work is about ideas, so it is hard to separate them from each other.  While at art school conceptual art reigned supreme. In a milieu that valued expressiveness and concepts my original interest in what an object looked like, realism, did not fit well. In response,  I spent a great deal of time thinking and working through the terms objective and subjective as they applied to art making.

I conducted experiments and found that a work produced while a person was drawing on their subjective experience contained contextual information while drawings produced by a person ‘objectively’ analyzing and recording what was directly in front of them tended to produce specific and singular details in a disassociative context.  Supposed subjective drawings tended crystalize to resemble reality more often than the drawings that were ‘objective’ did. I doubted that it was possible to be objective as it was clear that a person/artist is a lens through which all experience passes and is therefore translated into the subjective. * Were the expressive styles artists were using true visual representations of subjective experience or just a culturally accepted semiotic?

In retrospect, the ideas I explore in my work were set in motion by the conflict between my sense of being in this world and what I was being taught and told as a young child. I continue to be endlessly interested in the rub between my intuitive and logical sense of being here, in the question - what is true? Increasingly I find correlations and elucidations from the fields of neurology, psychology, sociology, and physics. My work continues to focus on perception, how it works and which elements can affect it. How do we sort, organize and think about reality in the way we do? When is knowing conscious, unconscious, logical or intuitive?  Are these separations  correct or useful?

It is not a special idea i chase, just a very old one:  how do we know? 

* (Nothing is in the mind which was not first in the senses--"'Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.')