Charles Campbell
Double Vision – Optical & Cognitive Meanings & Mythology
wall graphic detail
Although I assert strongly that art can be spoken about and that words do play a part in illuminating art works I am never the less uncomfortable when asked to speak or write about my own work. Partially it is the obtuse and hyperbolic language of contemporary criticism that I have never managed to feel at home with, but more importantly I am uncomfortable with the authority my words are assumed to have over my images.
Adrianne Piper’s “Mythic Being” series of the Seventies, where she took excerpts from her diary and placed them next to images of herself disguised as an man with exaggerated African American features, was illustrative of how the understanding of image and text were both dependent on the mythologies that surrounded them, and of how an obvious disjuncture could exist between words and image and yet remain invisible.
installation view
The disjuncture between my work and the words I wrap around it is problematic because the separation is not immediately apparent. Meaning seems to naturalise itself too easily onto images. My current project involves exploring the rift that should exist between the two. To do this I am exploiting the difference between the optical and cognitive understanding of an image. That is the difference between the eyes understanding of randomness, order, pattern, detail, symmetry and space and a cognitve understanding of signs and symbols.
The clearest example of this in my recent work is a translation of a diagram of how slaves were cargoed during the middle passage. This image is transformed into an intricate geometric pattern through repeated rotation and reflection around a central axis. The final image maintains its relationship to the source image but has a wholly different impact on the eye. The optic and cognitive understanding of the image moves in and out of phase, at times seeming to enforce one another, at times negating.
Ultimately I am looking for a way to use historical, personal and cultural icons without being determined by them; a way of exploring the rifts between meaning and image without creating an ambiguous space that will inevitably be filled with some cultural mythology.
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