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16/9/2014

Sleuthing the Mind

Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York

Curated by Ellen K. Levy

Sleuthing the Mind attempts to bring some of the automatic processes of the mind/brain—through which we perceive both ourselves and the world—into conscious recognition. The artists have constructed experiences, many disorienting, in which we might intuit what it means for minds to be divided, aroused, recalibrated, or rewired. Some of the artists in the exhibition aim to reset the viewer’s focus. All engage current neuroscientific concepts. Those works that appear to be near counterparts of scientific testing generally expand into personal, social, and political domains.

The works in the exhibition may encourage viewers to consider more fully the forces of attention, memory, feelings, and intuition. Many of the works seemingly align the brain’s ability to change as a result of experience with cultural developments. We may sense how minds mark culture and the reverse: how culture marks the mind.

This bidirectional inter-change allows us to connect with minds and creations across scales of time, thereby addressing, if only in part, why art matters The dynamic expansion of artistic practices through video, performance, human-computer interfaces, and virtual reality, along with traditional approaches, now offers new ways to bring adjustments of the body to conscious recognition and to explore the mind’s many facets. In Greg Garvey ’s video installation The Split-Brain (Dichoptic) Interface: Thomas v. Hill (1999/2014), the observer receives conflicting sounds and vision in each separate hemifield that she attempts to resolve. Garvey enables us to experience the quandary of a divided mind. Although he was influenced by Michael Gazzaniga’s split-brain research (itself informed by Roger Sperry), Garvey has imaginatively aligned the cognitive difficulty with the political dissonance of the Anita Hill/ Clarence Thomas hearings.
Kurt Hentschläger ’s generative audio-visual installation HIVE (2011) presents an ever-changing, swarming humanlike organism, confounding viewers with an extended sense of consciousness. Hentschläger realizes his vision through stereoscopy, by utilizing 3-D glasses with a specially prepared (layered) looping playback video file. In drawings displayed in 2007, Robert Buck (then known as Robert Beck) involved viewers in questioning some historical medical records of psychological functioning. During the 1960s, some psychologists purported to identify their patients’ emotional states through personality assessment tests in the form of drawings. Buck’s subsequent re-drawing undermined the belief that the drawings of the patients showed “evidence” of pathology. Affect is also explored in Nene Humphrey’s reestanding installation, Mapping (2013) that visualizes neural activity within the larger arena of our cultural world. Microscopic images of the brain (some gleaned from Joseph LeDoux’s laboratory) are coupled with Victorian mourning braids made with wire and festooned with crystal teardrops, beads, bookbinder’s cloth, and glass. The combination invokes rituals that fuse emotion and memory with the neurons that elicit such states of arousal. Similarly involved with emotion and empathy, Susan Aldworth uses a mixture of printing techniques in response to a friend having breast cancer in Fragility 3 and 4 (2009). Neuroimaging offers a whole new set of possibilities to explore the architecture of the brain. Aldworth uses it to expose our vulnerability in an existential sense.

Several artists in the exhibition explore the recalibration of our senses through art.

Sleuthing the Mind asks visitors to explore how art focused on the body and the constraints of vision can not only impact the systems of the brain but increase self-awareness. It presents us to ourselves as if we were strangers, attempting to “re-set” our minds.

Might art and art exhibitions add new paths into the understanding of intuition, insight, and attention?

Artists:
Susan Aldworth
Jennifer Bornstein
Hans Breder
Robert Buck
Jim Campbell
Suzanne Dikker and Matthias Oostrik
Gregory Garvey
Kurt Hentschläger
Nene Humphrey
Ellen K. Levy and Michael E. Goldberg
Mike Metz
Warren Neidich
Patricia Olynyk
Nicole Ottiger
Jane Philbrick
Jill Scott

This exhibition is made possible in part by a grant from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Panel discussion:
Art, Design, and the Cognitive Shift
Wednesday, October 8, 2014, 6:30 PM, room 213 (adjacent to the gallery

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 16, 6–8 PM
Special performance of “Axial Music” by George Quasha and Charles Stein at 7 PM

Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 West 14th Street, Second Floor New York, NY 10011
Hours: Monday–Saturday 11am–6pm, Thursdays until 8pm
Gallery will be closed December 24–January 1 and January 19
Admission is free

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