In the Mind’s Eye
In many ways, “In the Mind’s Eye” is about the relationship between vision, thought, and individual identity. The human eye is both selective and subjective. As a result of both conscious and unconscious thought, and each individual person consciously registers only a limited slice of the world.
What factors determine which snippets of life people grab on to and take with them is a difficult question to answer. Many artists have expressed their ideas on conscious and unconscious thought through their artwork. For example the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí was a firm believer in the fact that everyone’s individual reality is subjectively different depending on their own personal experience of and relationship to the world. Dalí studied dreams and he believed studies of the sub-conscious mind and dreams could tell us everything we want to know about what how what people see is processed and plays into their individual identity.
All of the presented artists in the show share one thing in common — a preoccupation with the inner workings of the human mind. Three different people can witness the same exact event and re-tell the story in three completely different ways. Similarly what we see when we look in the mirror is completely different from what another person sees when they look at us. The human eye can serve as a window to see new things, a mirror of perception and a door to new experiences. This ideology holds true throughout “In the Mind’s Eye.”
Surrealist painters of the early 20th century give viewers the opportunity to dive into strange realities that couldn’t be experienced in real life and give them a unique perspective on what may be going on inside their heads. René Margritte’s “The Secret Double,” from 1927, is a more up close and personal approach to thinking about what could be hidden under a person’s skin.
Behind a person’s emotionless face Margritte shows an entire world that is hidden from the rest of society. Margritte portrays something people experience everyday through human interaction. When we look at someone, we are presented with two ‘secrets’ or unanswered questions — what are the emotions they are showing on the surface and what is the chaos that lies beneath that expression.
Philip Bosmans takes a more contemporary approach to exploring consciousness with his “Portrait” from 2017. What appears to be a human face is mixed with facial features of different animals, all of which focus heavily on the eyes. With a name like “portrait,” once can predict that this may be Bosmans’ take on his own reflection or on the way he views someone else in his own mind.
The eye and specifically the iris are extremely important symbols for the soul and identity. Marc Quinn’s series Irises reflect the fact that our visual sense dominates our perception of the world, especially in an age when the internet has taken over everyday life. With his sculpture “Window,” from 2014, the viewer is invited to see the iris as window to see out of and a doorway to the world. The viewer can literally peer through the sculpture and can see through to what’s on the other side. Since no two irises are exactly the same, an up close view of the intricacies of the concrete sculpture leaves room for thought about the connection between the iris and individuality.
Quinn was not the first to think about the eye in this way. He was most-likely influenced by the ideas and the artwork of 20th century surrealist René Magritte. Margritte’s “The False Mirror,” an enormous, lashless, unblinking eye is filled with a cloudy blue sky. The image allows the viewer to consider the eye as a mirror and window to the outside world but also a door to a person’s inner thoughts and emotions.
An exhibition investigating human thought wouldn’t be successful without including pieces created by Salvador Dalí. Dalí’s “Persistence of Memory” has become extremely memorable because of it’s intriguing distortion of reality and dream-like qualities. This is one of the many works Dalí considered to be a “hand painted dream photograph,” because it was a credible representation of the thoughts inside his mind, which he believed was a whole other version of a reality. After intense research on neurologist Sigmund Freud’s studies on psychoanalysis, dreams and the subconscious mind, Dalí formulated a “paranoiac-critical method,” in which he self-induced psychotic hallucination in order to grab onto the ideas in his sub-conscious and use them to create art. In this painting like many others in the exhibition, Dalí decides to create a representation of himself. A large blob painted to represent his sleeping self is pictured melting in the sand of his home in Port Lligat, weighed down by the movement of time (the clock on his back).
A person’s perception of them self and others based on what they see in their own reflection. Dalí’s lesser known but equally important “Swans Reflecting Elephants,” and Raoul Hausmann’s photograph “Untitled” invite the viewer to consider this role reflection plays in individual identity. In the former, swans are seen peering over a calm body of water, their reflections warping them into an entirely different creature — elephants. Dalí asks the viewer to question whether the perception of themselves and others is real, and viewers are challenged to consider the idea that there is one single state of reality that all people share.
Hausmann’s “Untitled” is more of an individual experience. A figure peers through a mirror and is faced with a judgmental eye peering right back. Hausmann believed that it was essential for a person’s “optical awareness” to be open to “the beauty of the instant” rather than being tainted by beauty standards. This image was created in 1931, but it feels as though it could have belonged to any person in any time period. It could especially exist today, with social media and photo editing negatively warping a person’s perception of them self and others.
The artist Gitanjali Kashyap takes a more modern and spiritual approach on self reflection, with his detailed charcoal drawing titled “Reflection.” This piece draws the viewer into a man’s search for deeper meaning in his own existence.
The work featured in “In the Mind’s Eye” provides an invitation for people to think about everyday life in a completely different way. Each experience is a part of shaping individual identity, and the mind is its own unique reality as a result. The viewer is challenged with many questions, the largest one being; what is reality? We’ve lived our lives believing that what we see is what everyone sees, but going forward must consider infinite perspectives and realities.
