Flow & Hemisphere Mythology - New Work
04/08/2011 | Comments: 1
It's been a bit quiet around here. You see, it's because I've had a lot of awesome things going on. Chief among them has been preparing for my new solo exhibition (opening next Friday) titled "Flow & Hemisphere Mythology."
After exploring many different combinations of digital and analog mediums, I have finally settled on something I think is worth sharing. That search was driven primarily by a desire to use these sometimes diametrically cast "ways of making" in a harmonious way - and as a metaphor for the combination of logical and creative brain functions.
At the top of my pet-peeves list is propagation of the left brain vs. right brain / logical brain vs. creative brain myth which suggests that one hemisphere is dominant over the other. You've heard this rubbish before, undoubtedly. "Right brain people are creative." "Left brain people are logical."
Forget that.
Sure, the brain is lateralized and its hemispheres do have independent and specialized functions. The gross oversimplification that a person's brain primarily operates on one of these hemispheres is the distinction that galls me so.
The truth is that these hemispheres work in tandem and support one another. You are a whole-brained creature. If damaged, one hemisphere is even able to take on the work previously done by the other.
While there is no denying that some people are more creative than others and that some are more rational - these are not mutually exclusive traits. Logic is needed for creativity and creativity for logic.
(above) ".bird" - resin, toner, ink, paper, birch - 24x24"
The work in this exhibit is an exercise in connecting these hemispheres. It is a combination of computer aided "drawings of themselves" made through a recursive algorithm - and hand drawn ink, responding to these shapes. It is a combination of mechanical and synthetic media and output processes with more organic media. The source imagery for these abstractions is portrait photography - which survives partially intact. So it is also a bit of a combination of representationalism and abstraction.
In producing these works, for the first time in many, many years I achieved a feeling of involvement with the process that I had lost working soley with a computer. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it "flow" a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. The theory goes that this feeling is directly related to hemispheric harmony.
For more, check out the article, "The Right-Brain / Left-Brain Myth and Flow" by Carolyn Kaufman from Archetype.
Man,that's a really nice Photograph, who took those pictures???