It sometimes felt difficult to escape the strange pressures that quietly stage our realities. There always seemed to be some underlying need to see things only in more cleansed and purified ways. And there was a peculiar sense that all the messy, hidden layers lying beneath them all should somehow be simply swept away. A truer sense of reality always seemed to be lingering, waiting to be seen, if only we could strip away some of those untidy bumps scuffing their veneers.
Yet I’ve never really sensed that these versions of reality carried much truth in them. They never felt all that generous in spirit.
A view is often already layered with countless frames by the time it arrives before us. It carries wants, remembrances, fears, pressures, climates, hours, along with thousands of small interactions quietly shaping its surfaces and character.
And a camera’s eye can never simply record these layers away, as it flashes past. Nor does a painting, screen, projection, or symbol merely reflect strictly what we want to know. I realized how we all choose, reframe, and re-edit continuously, myself included. And more often than not, these edits tend to go unnoticed. Nonetheless, the messier elements continue to creep in. They do remain.
And this seemed important to the way we read images — perhaps even necessary.
Despite our strange appetite for purity — the real image, the authentic hurt, or the supposedly untouched or unmediated feeling — I’ve come to believe that a richer, more powerful reality exists in the many messy layers pressing beneath them all. These are never just problems to be neatly cleansed. But the greater danger remains that we often forget that they ever existed in the first place.
Reality accumulates. Its layers build. It collects histories, pressures, memories and countless other gazes, each altering the things we perceive.
And perhaps this is what can make artworks so powerful. They can remind us that seeing is something we build and participate in as a constant act of discovery, not just the stripping away of whatever scuffs the first view.
Yet I’ve never really sensed that these versions of reality carried much truth in them. They never felt all that generous in spirit.
A view is often already layered with countless frames by the time it arrives before us. It carries wants, remembrances, fears, pressures, climates, hours, along with thousands of small interactions quietly shaping its surfaces and character.
And a camera’s eye can never simply record these layers away, as it flashes past. Nor does a painting, screen, projection, or symbol merely reflect strictly what we want to know. I realized how we all choose, reframe, and re-edit continuously, myself included. And more often than not, these edits tend to go unnoticed. Nonetheless, the messier elements continue to creep in. They do remain.
And this seemed important to the way we read images — perhaps even necessary.
Despite our strange appetite for purity — the real image, the authentic hurt, or the supposedly untouched or unmediated feeling — I’ve come to believe that a richer, more powerful reality exists in the many messy layers pressing beneath them all. These are never just problems to be neatly cleansed. But the greater danger remains that we often forget that they ever existed in the first place.
Reality accumulates. Its layers build. It collects histories, pressures, memories and countless other gazes, each altering the things we perceive.
And perhaps this is what can make artworks so powerful. They can remind us that seeing is something we build and participate in as a constant act of discovery, not just the stripping away of whatever scuffs the first view.