Artist’s Statement, Part I.

FB-Landing Cage 36x27-Stephen Calhoun

Ongoing, and maybe, never ending project aims to describe what I’m up to, as an artist. In my case, my hope is that the statement unhooks the viewer from its priming effect. My artistic goal hopes to invert the conventional idea that the viewer is supposed to correctly decode the artist’s authoritative objective, itself intentionally encoded in the so-called global unified material object. I do not encode my work with this end in mind, so there cannot be anything but authoritative experiences.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

I.

My art’s aim is to grip the viewer, and then inspire the viewer to seek their own unique discoveries in each piece. The pieces present deep opportunities for visual serendipity by drawing the viewer into experiential, insightful, seeking.

I do not create images to pre-program or encode the viewer’s experience. Each piece is underdetermined up to the point of the viewer’s enactive presence and constructive experience.

The pieces aim to invoke a kind of pareidolia. (Pareidolia–the grasp of order from seeming randomness–is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognizable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data.)

The engaged viewer completes the image’s possible program by virtue of their own subjective and unique experience.

My artistic intention is evoke the truth of spontaneous discovery. Each piece captures an experimental result. The viewer’s unique encounter and seeking completes the experiment.

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