LIGHT SENSE 2011

LIGHT SENSE

 

All objects we ‘see’ are the world, made and perceived by means of prejudice. This is why we face the world before an act of ‘seeing’. How we see the world is also a problem of ourselves, as subjects of an act of ‘seeing’. We see the world through our eyes. 

 

In certain philosophies, to ‘see’ is to ‘perceive’. In Buddhism, subjects of perception are classified into the Five Senses, Six Senses, Seven Senses, or Eight Senses. The first sense, the ‘light sense’ is perceiving through the eyes. To perceive with the eyes is the basis and lowest level of all perception, and can lead to wrong perceptions. Likewise, to see seems to be reliable, but in a sense unreliable most. 

 

Photography is a means to rediscover the way of seeing with the eyes. Photography involves duplicity: it records a moment of truth and simultaneously captures the shadow of falsehood. 

 

For Roland Barthes photography is not pure and always has a frame of representation containing ideal meaning, and it features one’s own image, not those of others. This is like religious belief, corresponding to a fundamental rule of cognitive psychology, that we always see what we know. 

 

The commonality of what I capture in my work is they are subjects within femininity. The reason I abstract them through mosaic is to make viewers see them anew. To see them through an objective standard of beauty without prejudice is possible through the loss of concrete objective form. Our prejudice toward images, secured through this device, blinds our eyes toward the truth of objects. 

 

We see what we want to see, believing illusions derived from ourselves, like religious belief rather than recognizing the substance and nature of truth within outer appearance. 

 

Visual information in contemporary society underscores such belief. But if we cannot perceive the substance and nature of objects, they are mere images.