All visual experience is filtered, as the brain categorizes and creates patterns in order to attempt an understanding of what is being experienced. I am interested in creating visual fields that challenge this function, and leave the mind in a state of suspension between recognition and unrecognition. My subject matter is derived from photographs of the contemporary inhabited environment, and are records of my daily experience. I translate, reduce, and transform these images through a meticulous process that is descriptive of both the struggle to discover pattern, and the acceptance of unintelligible complexity.
My process in making the drawings and paintings mirrors the process that the mind enacts in decoding visual experience. Breaking the image into confined shapes and an organized value structure creates order from a complex field of visual information. However, the newly presented image is reduced to a system that actually camoflauges the original object since the overall image is no longer entirely recognizable in its fragmented state. The result is similar to the state of mind when listening to a complex and new piece of music, where there is a constant attempt to organize, label, and understand, although this attempt actually disrupts the continuity of the experience of listening. My paintings present both opportunities; they offer a field that can either be reconstructed and named, or can be accepted and felt.
The paintings create a sense of the sublime – the beautiful and the frightening – from the ordinary. As we learn more about the machinations of our own minds, we are consistently reminded of the limitations of our understanding, and the ways in which biology dictates much about the ways in which we experience the world. I am interested in exploring this tension – acknowledging both our increasingly obvious limitations, and our innate desire to transcend them. Life is strange and complicated, and there is much that is unknowable; in embracing this, visual experience becomes an intimate act infused with hope.
You may download a pdf of Mindy’s CV here.