Jessie Shinn
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Statement

 
Perhaps the most amazing sensation passed on to us by prehistoric man is that of presentiment. It will always continue. We might consider it as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe. Original man must have wandered through a world full of uncanny signs. He must have trembled at each step.
                                                                                                                           Giorgio de Chirico
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My work addresses the mysterious and confusing parts of human life – wonder and ambiguity, familiarity and strangeness, imagination and fear, the slipperiness of time and space, light and dark. I look for moments that combine surprise and recognition in a flash of light, shadow, reflection, color, line, or shape within the overlooked, ephemeral and ordinary. I am interested in visual confusion, tricks of light and mirage, and the aura that can suddenly surround everyday objects, places, and spaces. I am seeking the charge of things - hidden and revealed, real and imagined.

Sometimes even when we have words, they are inadequate, or seem inaccessible. Yet experiences that can’t be described can still have resonance, affect. They may touch, move, or infect; they may manifest a feeling, disposition or tendency.  I make images to access that space where my knowledge and language fail.

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​​                ...it has just now come to mind that the fire I am perhaps going to build at the                      garbage disposal area, in order to watch it glisten on the broken bottles, is             something else that only exists in my head.

                ...Moreover, what is really in my head is not the fire either, but that painting by                    Van Gogh of the fire.

                Which is to say the painting by Van Gogh that one can see if one squints just a                      little. With all of those swirls, as in The Starry Night.

                ...All I had started to say, I think, is that I am seeing a painting that Van Gogh did                  not paint...which to begin with is of a fire that I myself have not built.

                Although what I have entirely left out is that the painting is not actually of the                        fire either, but of a reflection of the fire.

                                                                                          David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
 

What the arts speculate on is not the status of a truth or fact, but what it feels like to feel oneself affecting and being affected by and as an occasion of experience.
                                                                                                       Eldritch Priest, Earworm + Event
 

​Phenomenophilia is looking away at the colored shadow on the wall, or keeping the head turned to the angle at which the sunspot stays in view... We can't believe ourselves entitled to this feeling about a perceptual object so ephemeral that we can't even imagine that someone else would see it as we do, or even see it at all... something that could be coming to be and does not yet have the liabilities of anything that is.
                                                                                                                  Rei Terada, Looking Away 
 

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