Space & Time - 15 - Limited Edition of 10 Photograph

A few months back, I went to a series of talks given by various industry experts. One panel of speakers included curators from the National Gallery of Victoria and they spoke about how museums—and by extension art and artists—don’t necessarily have to instill any particular thing or basis of knowledge to their patrons. Sometimes, giving someone an aesthetic experience is enough. Gestaltism is a branch of psychology which describes the phenom of sensation and perception as linked, but separate entities. In the context of a song for example, you can sense the individual notes and probably measure or describe things like pitch, rhythm, volume etc… But only when you holistically hear the music can you feel the music. Mark Rothko also talked quite a lot about this in this own work, as quoted, “I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on”. Since the initial inspiration for this series spanned multiple varied disciplines, I took it as a personal challenge to present the series through a multidisciplinary lens as well. My intent with this series of images was to offer the viewer a feeling rather than a seeing. Although I have used color and abstraction and form in my images, my intent wasn’t to showcase color or form or physicality, but rather to instill a sense of feeling for the viewer using not only these things, but also distortions of time and space. My intent isn’t for a viewer to see things in the images. They aren’t a Rorschach test for what you can see, but rather a catalyst to feeling. Growing up, I was fascinated by art. When all the other kids would be outside playing baseball, I preferred to be inside coloring and making dioramas for my action figures to play in. This obsession with art extended to my other obsession: books. My mother would take me to the library every weekend over the summer and those are some of my fondest childhood memories. Despite reading so much about artists and art movements, I never really understood some of the art. What is this single color on canvas bullshit? I was lucky enough to see Latifa Echakhch’s “A chaque stencil une revolution (For each stencil a revolution)” at a recent trip to GOMA. And then more recently, I got to see Rothko’s Untitled (Red) at NGV.