perception

Manifestation investigates multi-layered ideas that form my art practice. Within my work, I started to raise questions without regard to the right answer or any answer at all. I was obsessed with the space surrounding us, our perceptions, our body awareness, and how we perceive what we know as reality; I seek to understand how even the most quotidian experiences may have been staged for surveillance, manipulation, and control. Each project led me to enrich my next work and highlighted new concerns that we all are, at different levels, already concerned with. My creative process is based on experimentation, learning, and exploring, using technology, science, and psychology, and in this paper, I explore a series of terms I think of as the lexicon of my practice in relation to particular projects that illustrate their manifestations.

By examining phenomenology and the work of Julia Kristeva along with outlining an historical progression of experiential artists stemming from the sublime and onto body artists, this thesis defends the rationale and methodology behind the performative endurance work 5 Day Fast: [My Theses on Art], also known as 5DF, by Nick Rivers. This body of work is influenced by research and exploration of perception, the body, 'self', and 'the other.' Being concerned with Ontology and existence, the desire to transcend our reality and existence through art, in art, and with art is taken up as a political statement; a reaction against the current socio-political climate, the mundane, and the trivial concerns of life. Instead, 5DF is a refuge into art; an examination of how we are all connected and related to one another. 5DF challenges the truth and clarity behind the individuals' perception and authenticity.

This thesis attempts to analyze the effects of my father's job as an investigator of violent crime on himself and our family life. Using a wide range of mediums, the thesis work creates an anecdotal on-going investigation, examining family history and deconstructing conventional perceptions of domesticity and the home. A mix of photographs, furniture remnants and objects blend into a life-size cabinet of curiosities. The displaced objects mimic a home that has been dismantled for the viewer to inspect. By selecting and arranging objects and images, I created an ectopic visual narrative much like Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan's Evidence book, highlighting a mixture of the somber and strange in visual information with little context. Among this mixture of work is a strong theme of removal and misperception. Examining and reconstructing familiar objects from the home places importance on individual perception, challenging the viewer to inspect what has been removed and what has been left behind.

What is reality? To most people it is what you see with your eyes, what you hear with your ears, what you can touch, taste, and smell. Reality is what you sense of the external world that exists independently from your internal mind. The senses relay data to the brain via the nervous system and perceptions are formed. We consider our perceptions of reality to be an accurate depiction of how the world really is. But what if its not as simple as that? I am interested in perception as it is fundamentally related to both the human experience and art.