Welcome to The Cogneyezant Project.
Here you’ll find two projects exploring creative practice and perception in all its mystery, mundanity, and monstrosity.
How do you pronounce CognEYEzant? Same as the word cognizant (meaning to be knowledgeable and aware), but I got playful and put an eye in the center of the word. So this project is an exploration of perceptual awareness, a practice in becoming more aware and curious about the perceptions that swirl in and around us, creating our world(s).
Part 1 | CognEYEzant:365
About outward, curious exploration of perception. An eye every single day for a year, June 21, 2018 — June 20, 2019. From sketches to portraits to artistic studies to elaborate paintings, I created each eye in a 24-hour window. Most have stories, connections, and essays attached. The variety in style and context speaks to creative range but also novelty-seeking as the practice continued, day after day after day.
Part 2 | CognEYEzant:52
About inward, reflective exploration of perception. Alternating personal essays and paintings every week for a year, from November 1, 2019, to October 31, 2020. Each of the project’s 14 “chapters” is an essay accompanied by illustrative painting(s). All 26 paintings connect to each other, creating a single installation representing the golden spiral to scale.
Time, context, and you: some why behind the project.
Time: This project was started by a (sometimes angsty, always stubborn) teenager in her attempt to explore creative practice and use art as a way to connect in a rapidly changing world.
What began as a creative challenge (CognEYEzant:365), quickly turned into an independent study project that pulled threads of what was urgent and emerging as I finished my secondary education. Little did 17-year-old me know, on the June day I started the project, I was opening a can of perception worms that I would never choose to close again.
So, of course, a second project began not long after the first ended. There is nothing quite so motivating than your creative skills not matching up to your ideas and realizing your ideas are only just beginning to scratch the surface of something very, very deep. Both projects are a call to explore perception, plurality, stories, and creative connections, things that can go on forever and ever.
Context: I created the first two years of this project at a time when the world was drastically changing how we connected with each other. It wasn’t just the COVID-19 Pandemic, it’s continuing globalization and increasing nationalism, it’s climate catastrophe and technologizing of our social lives. Uncertainty, ambiguity, change, urgency. These are ever-present. And pausing to reflect on our perceptions sometimes feels impossible.
There isn’t any way we could ever pause to take in all the stories, feelings, thoughts, and data to make sense of it. Instead, we can create stories and art to try and stick the complexity together enough to begin to make sense.
You: The CognEYEzant Project has become a simple invitation from late-teen/early young adult me to you, whoever you are in your present moment, to pause. Pause, for however long you might have, and use my work as a springboard to get curious and reflective as you dive into the stories around and within you.