Matty's arXive: Artistic Process
My photographic work focuses on layering images using digital photo-editing tools, in order to represent the way in which perception is layered. The layers found in perception arise from a combination of internal factors, like memory and attention, and external senses, like vision and sound. The concept of "torn pages" represent the fragmented, often isolated nature of perception (think of pages torn from a book, so that only snippets of the whole story is ever known to us).
A popular hypothesis in the field of neuroscience is that perception is the result of our brains combining sensory information with internal models. That is, our brains create internal models of how they expect the world to be (these could be different types of memory), which then combines with sensory information (vision/sound/etc.) to generate perception.
I display each of my pieces as triptychs (three images), and in each you may notice a common theme: each triptych includes the moon and silhouetted figures. The moon, which is distant to the earth but intrinsically connected to it, represents the external environment (i.e., sensory information), whilst the silhouettes represent our internal worlds, like memory and imagination. In combination, these two elements generate perception: the third image in the triptych.
It is easy to think that photographs are accurate representations of reality. But by intentionally layering images, my aim is to question the viewers assumptions about the truth of not just photographs, but of perception itself.
