34”x34” Pt. 1 © Nadia Daniels-Moehle. 2020. Acrylic on wood.
As a child I would keep myself up at night, marveling at and terrified by the fact that every single human has such utterly different experiences. Not much has changed. Though, now, I watch myself get stuck in a world of my internal perceptions, my imagination. I watch as my reality turns surreal, and the next thing I know, I have woken up from a dream. While I can escape my dreams, I can’t escape the perception that creates them, a perception that will operate as long as I do, a perception that, despite its persistence, can be incredibly hard to see.
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote (pdf / Bookshop) “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.)” Most of the time, our perceptions are as easy to look past as a sticky note endlessly stuck on a bathroom mirror. Our perceptions need us to step back and get reacquainted because perceptions guide us and literally shape our world.
The act of perception is more than absorbing outside information, it’s also interpreting our senses through our memories, beliefs, and biases until perception is not a direct reflection of the world but a direct reflection of our world. “[O]ur perceptions come from the inside out just as much as, if not more than, the outside in.” Anil K. Seth, professor of neuroscience, clarifies, “[r]ather than being a passive registration of an external objective reality, perception emerges as a process of active construction”.
Just as perceptions actively construct the world around us, we also have the capability to construct our perceptions. Our challenge is to realize and remind ourselves that despite the multitudes of shared experiences, every single person’s perceptions infinitely differ. Our challenge is to wade through a world in which it is all too easy for a single perspective to rise above the rest and claim itself as objective truth.
Universal objectivity creates what scholar Donna Haraway describes as “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” which is humanly impossible and is impossible to check the origins of knowledge claims. In “Situated Knowledges,” (pdf / Bookshop) Haraway explores the scientific possibilities for an accountable, feminist objectivity where every piece of knowledge is inherently tied to where, when, and who it originates from.
To be accountable to the perspectives surrounding and within us—in the present, in the historical past, and in the future—is a constant process. A process that I think can be facilitated by art, which seems to have the ability to make perceptions apparent, if only in glimpses. Whether a horribly biased aesthetic representation or an unsettling narrative or speculative fiction and world-building, art can attempt to make “obvious” the internal reality of our perceptions. At least, this is what I’ve observed from my own experience.
In the middle of a road, in the middle of summer, “A Taxonomy of Perception” began.
As passers by on the street during a downtown event began dipped paintbrushes into paint, they didn’t yet know that their thoughts were about to become part of the work they were creating. When each person was finished, they wrote down, in a handful of words, what they thought about while they painted. All of these situated experiences morphed into an invitation to touch and spin the human-sized wooden rings filled with paint, to read and ponder the giant sheets of paper filled with the participants’ perceptions.
This community art project reminds me of how art’s process—whether paintings, films, poetry, storytelling, photographs, music, or whispering how a day went just before sleep—may be as close as we can get to internal perceptions existing physically. But even with this physicality, even with art’s generous and challenging guidance, we are still guided and sometimes blinded by the perception that will always accompany us, seen or unseen, constantly morphing, constricting and expanding with each piece of media and perception it comes across. Like Wittgenstein put into words and experience puts into practice, it might be our own perceptions that are the hardest to see which we must constantly attempt to make tangible.
This 34 inch painting is inspired by Look Wonder Discover’s 2019 Community Art Project “A Taxonomy of Perceptions” and Mandelbrot Sets. Mandelbrot sets are complex forms of fractals which are self similar patterns that repeat infinitely–reminiscent of our perceptions.