Friday, June 18, 2010

Boundless Boundaries

Everything isn't necessarily what it seems. This phrase sparked the birth of this piece. It is about seeing and experiencing things in a new way. I believe that over time, through mindless repetition and convenience, we have trained ourselves to do things certain ways and to think of things in certain ways, thus causing limitations on all the other possibilities out there. It's near impossible for us to grasp the thought of going about certain tasks in different ways or seeing things in different ways. We are taught the ways of how things are "suppose" to be, and we live with them. But, when we are young, before our minds are corrupt with how things are suppose to be, our imaginations are boundless. Ask a grown person to draw a person, and he will most likely draw a head, chest, torso, pelvis, legs, and feet; ask a five year old person to draw a person and there is no telling what you'll get! It's amazing!

As humans, we tend to create everything in our image. Look at the common representation of an alien for example. When you look at a piece of wood or a pile of objects, do you not sometimes see faces? I think it's because it's hard to perceive something that we don't know and are not familiar with.

Thinking of things in different ways is a hard thing to do when you're so use to doing things the same way. Why don't we brush our teeth with our feet? Why isn't our armpit hair as obsessed about as the hair on top of our head? Why do we live in families and not herds, packs, or flocks? Why do we still produce so much garbage and waste when we know the dangerous effects on our possible future?

This piece comments on this, with the example of the perception of the human figure and how we have been trained to view a living thing. I have created a second skin for my body by draping both bulbous and constricting sections on different parts of the body to deform and skew the form of the body. I then image transferred images of various parts of my body and placed them on the "wrong" parts to further transform the perception. There is a taught line going from my head to my foot forcing me to have an abnormal posture. This constriction shows how we are bound by what we have been so comfortably trained to do.

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