Set-up

My creative work is personally concerned with seeing, perception, constructive sensation, serendipity, complexity, reflection, randomness, improvisation, consciousness, intuition, assembly, patterns, pattern-making, symbols, cognition, archetypes, mystery, ad hoc narratives, self-awareness, pure experience, epiphany, spontaneous apprehension, alchemy, underdetermination, pareidolia, abduction, 2nd order cybernetics, mandalas, enantiodromia, learning, unlearning, meditation, yin/yang, enaction, cave art, africa, mysticism, jazz, neurophenomenology, and other stuff.

Over four decades, my passion for music as a listener and player has deeply informed my outlook, personal culture, and each of my creative practices. Over two decades, my research and studies have come to be primarily organized around experiential learning, adult development, 2nd order social cybernetics, serendipity, enactivism, and, Analytical Psychology. All of these concerns either inflect or are woven deeply into my creative process.

At the same time, my art practice and art works are not expressly about any of this background. If you circle back to me you may be missing the only intended point of my art work.

[Artists] love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. — Rollo May

Art-making has an alchemical effect on the imagination. It awakens the senses and sharpens insights, teaching us to think in symbols, metaphors, and to de-code complexity, so we can perceive the world in new ways.— Linda Naiman

Several associates of mine (in the field of adult and organizational development) were invited to submit questions to the artist. 

Mai: What kind of message would you like to communicate to your audience through your art projects?

Holly: What message are you hoping to deliver through your art?

Stephen: My art works present opportunities rather than messages. So, most individual art works aim to set up the possibility of an encounter between the viewer’s engaged awareness and its—in my terms—field. My hope is for the viewer to stop, look, then see into the art work’s territory. I design to a partial degree this territory and create to a partial degree some of its visual relations.

Since 2012, the main organizing principal of all my art practice, whether it is based in photographs, generative procedures, or a combination of both, has been the mirror symmetry and the way the symmetry comes to shape and define forms and patterns and coherent relations within this territory. My original hypothesis was that a viewer would be compelled to attend to, via their experience, the exploration of the field and the territory of the image. The viewer would be inspired by the mysterious and vibrant relations to seek and discover relations and meaningfulness on entirely their own terms.

“Delivery” is perhaps a better term than communicate, yet, the viewer is also left to their own devices so as to also allow for communication to unfold from ‘up and out of’ their engaged exploration. However, I do not create and produce art pieces for the sake of sending explicit messages that I have authored. There is no intentional encoding of such messages. There are no opportunities for the viewer to annunciate that he or she has successfully uncovered or discovered any such authored messages of this explicit kind.

At the same time viewers can circle back to contexts and references, and in doing so, circle back to my concerns. This is fine but isn’t the point of my art work; nor does it improve the experience. My concerns are not what my art is about.

In supposing that the viewer engages the field of the art work and learns something on their own and does so without needing to gather up, also, lots of related context and referenced content, I am adhering to a well-known default held by some artists. Yuko Mizobuchi puts it well.

Yuko Mizobuchi: My works are means to rediscover and awaken the memory of your DNA that has been dormant since the ancient time, the senses any living beings can have, and to regain the power of imagination. Art does not require explanations: It is to feel and imagine with your ‘mind brain’, instead of your ‘logical brain’. It opens up the eye of your ‘mind brain’ – I believe that is the power of art. It has become a lengthy message, but actually this explanation of mine itself is meaningless. I just want you to see, feel and imagine my actual paintings with your mind brain. No logic has a place there.

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