In My Mind's Eye: Pareidolia in Nature (Selections from Vibrant Night [Light Painting Landscapes])

LENSCULTURE – ART 2019a – In My Mind’s Eye: Pareidolia in Nature Pareidolia is the illusion of things appearing as something else (eg., faces in clouds). It's one way the brain deals with ambiguous patterns and has long been used in art, including the creation and decoding of some types of abstract art. It is one part of my main body of work, Vibrant Night (Light Painting Landscapes): a part that suggests illusory abstract creatures. This part offers the best visual metaphor for my vibrancy theme of everything seeming alive and striving in nature – a view common to some Eastern religions and historic Native American beliefs. To me, it also suggests that we should respect nature as if all things were alive and might be capable of influencing Earth's ecosystems (akin to the Gaia theory). Using long exposures during which I selectively "paint" with light beams of different color temperatures, I expressionistically transform these photos, often with extensive post-processing, to imply the illusion I saw in my mind’s eye. (And to me, this transformation offers a visual metaphor to a psychological concept: Things can seem different if seen in a different light – the concept of "cognitive reframing.") In this presentation, I symbolize my process itself by starting with a visual metaphor of my “mind’s eye” (from a stylized hay bale) and then sequencing images of pareidolic beings to emphasize their gaze as if they too have their own mentations and ways of seeing things. As do we all.