St. Paul Street Gallery Pilot Exhibition, 2009

Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear

This exploration of perspective yields no railway tracks or checkerboard floor. To give in to such traditions is not necessary. Instead, what we have here is a strategic manipulation of the Cartesian plane. It is an investigation into inhabiting both two and three dimensions.

But what begins instead is a domino effect. The mind’s eye will begin conversing with the actual eye, which then argues with the brain about ocular logic, while the brain starts directing limbs towards suitable positioning in order to see what it thinks it should be seeing.

This search for a single point of correctness is a making sense of the space. But this negotiation is both fruitless and fruitful. Fruitless in the sense that if you lazily let your mind fill in the blanks, if you walk away with a memory of what you think you saw, you will be cheating.

But fruitful if we agree to participate in the game, if what we are left with is ourselves, not as a viewer, but as an engager. Through this hunt for that one degree of vision, the point where the two dimension and three dimensions cohere. It isn’t perspective that we gain, but skills that allow us to navigate inward terrains. This space for contemplation is a privilege. And although the physicality of what we see is transient, such reckonings are not.
- Agnes So

This a couplet from Upanishad:
“From Joy springs all collections,
by joy it is sustained,
towards joy it proceeds,
and to joy it returns.”
Mundaka Upanishad