The Mills show

A major theme in the work at the Mills Gallery is to explore the disparity of strict theoretical geometry and the actuality uncertainty of the physical world.  Is there a geometric underpinning to all matter? Many Greek philosophers would have said that this is the case and it is certainly an appealing idea.  Especially appealing considering that there do seem to be fundamental shapes of matter and energy.  These don’t necessarily break down the way Plato predicted, with four fundamental elements made up of five fundamental geometric solids, or as tidily as Pythagoras determined the motion of the heavenly spheres to be, with friction between the perfect geometric relationships of celestial bodies producing sounds of sublime beauty that were beyond our hearing capability.  But there is something convincing about the way that each ice crystal will form in a particular way, consistently six-sided, or about the way that you can predict the folding tendency of protein in DNA based purely on it’s physical building blocks.  And so, it is appealing to think that matter is responding to a set of perfect geometric instructions, attempting to match an otherworldly ideal of form.

Still, there are imperfections. Variables beyond reckoning will influence the formation of what would otherwise be a perfect system and can account for a tremendous diversity in form, even when originating from a similar set of instructions.  But certainly there is a way of explaining and predicting these variables. All physical things are governed by the same physical rules and are made up of the same basic set of materials, or at least this is the case in the perceptible physical world.  The problem to interpreting this multitude of order lies in the relationship between the sheer number of things that can happen at any given moment and the amount of time that our consciousness has to sort it out.

Consciousness in humans is a complex, irreducible thing.  It enables us to consider our mortality and to perform actions that are not clearly for betterment of self or species.  That is on the lofty end, but it also allows us to survive in the world and can provide a quick understanding of the environment so that big decisions of action can be taken quickly without tripping over the details. Many multitudes of details go unnoticed, or at least consciously so, but are subtly folded into the overall picture of the world.  Distance and depth of objects in a room can be ascertained merely by measuring the different images received by the left and right eyes.  Subtle directional changes of objects are registered by millisecond differential in the arrival of sound waves to the ears. And so it seems that the body is busy, constantly gathering clues in order to piece together a navigable model of the world.  But it is just that, a model of the world that we inhabit, with similarities to the outer, physical world but not exact matches. 

We see what we need, just the details that are most essential to forming a sense of the world and then off to bigger decisions.  We are extraordinarily good as incorporating many different stimuli into our worldview, but if you don’t need it, it doesn’t always make it in. An example is when you are looking for a new pair of shoes; it is hard not to notice feet everywhere.  They were there before, but not important and so they didn’t register. This is not to say that you would assume that people have no feet, but if nothing remarkable was discovered by a quick scan with the senses, the feet would be filled in from remembered or stock feet.  Much of the world is functionally unchanging for our daily lives and so it can be recreated from vague memory without risking harm to the essential activities.

We see what we want, things that fit in our worldview, things that we expect to see and an environment that is easy to comprehend. 
Still, much gets lost in the shuffle of functionality.  There is a huge amount of information that not only goes unnoticed, but is unnoticeable by our physical sensory apparatus.  We form a visual model of the world, but how different would the infrared vision of vipers seem to us. Or the magnetic landscape of sea turtles.  It is extremely easy to mistake the model that we create of the world for the actual world.

The work at the Mills will be an attempt to undermine our reductive tendencies and to draw unexpected relationships between physical stimuli.  It involves the idea that physical objects can affect perceptual space the way they alter space-time. We know that seemingly fixed aspects of the universe such as length and weight depend entirely on who is doing the measuring and in reference to what.  Large objects exert force on the fabric of space-time and so affect other objects in the vicinity.  There is an analogous relationship in our perceptual process of objects in a room. Visual density can change our understanding of space and that can alter the way we perceive sound in that context.  This can lead to a short circuit in the action of intention on perception and a momentary chance to experience the irreducible aspects of the physical world.