Presence Pr24-21

www.fahn.com.au

@fahnjim

The vision for my art is to create conscious presence through multi-perspectival ambiguity. My background as an architect and inventor trained my brain in abstractions - flipping from plan, section, to detail, often within the same drawing. Our collective perception is equally being re-trained by the plethora of images that we consume, often through social media – from first person drone view, to microscopic, portrait, and celestial images coming from satellites. This rapid shift in perspective I call the ‘perspectival flip’, our cognitive ability to quickly switch perspective and understanding as new images present.

Humans are uncannily good at pattern recognition, but we often get this wrong as we try to understand the world. This is called Pareidolia – seeing patterns where they don’t exist, such as Jesus in a piece of toast. My art pushes into this realm, exploring ambiguity and unknowing, a uniquely human quandary explored by philosophers for millennia.

My art begins with gestural abstraction as floor drawing, creating consciously without intention, making space for what arises. For me, each drawing contains ‘perspectival flips’, a reading that shifts from topographic, to elevational, to portrait, etcetera. I then lean into these ambiguities in my collaboration with a 3D digital cutting machine, abstracting the original floor drawings into mixed media artworks. By working with the machine as an extension of myself and working consciously, I allow for what arises. This is often a compounding of ‘flips’. I find a new artwork in the process.

In this conscious engagement with ambiguity, and the digital and analogue tools that I use, I find presence. Moments of contemplation in engagement with the artworks. It is this presence that I seek to share in my ambiguous ‘perspectival flip’ artworks. An engagement with the moment, a recognition of unknowing, a connection to our human condition.