installations
“Illuminating Visions of the Unseen” (BFA Exhibition)
Notes
“Illuminating Visions of the Unseen”
“Visual intuitions are one of the most potent tools we possess for feeling our way into the unknown”. Martin Kemp
This project is rooted in a childhood experience when my mother took me to a naturopath who administered a blood-based examination. The specialist poked my thumb with a pin and placed a drop of blood onto a plexiglass slide. The blood was examined under a microscope which was connected to an analog video translator device. All of a sudden, ambiguous black and white images appeared and bounced across the screen.
Last year I repeated the experience with the same naturopath, the same office, and the same sensory triggers resurfaced. This time, however, I could comprehend the diagnostic language and I could connect with the images displayed on the monitor as a representation of the universe within me. The event was a type of transcendental experience that opened a window into my existence on a micro level. As I sat and watched my blood cells progressively decompose to the final death, I became keenly aware of my own mortality, and the impermanence of life.
I came to the understanding that this phenomenon was an extended metaphor of things that might happen at the macroscopic level mirroring interstellar space of stars and planets that are governed by similar laws of physics. In my installation, the viewer stands between these two extremes, the micro and the macro, illuminated by artificial light, either by a microscope or a telescope. Although we can never go there, or be there, we know they exist by illuminating the unseen.
Both art and science are intuitive disciplines that utilize imagination, and a sense of wonder in probing the mystery of the universe that is beyond the limitations of human sight. There is beauty in the forms of the unseen that has been expressed by artists, and has been explored by scientists alike. Ultimately, the goal of this installation is to expand a sense of wonder, and to consider these two contrasting extremes of existence.