Artist Statement

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. ~ Degas

When scrutinized closely, one can see that there is a disparity between what we perceive and what we expect to see. The lack of an awareness to this phenomenon leads to habits of perception. This causes the mind’s capacity for innovation to atrophy and invites one’s fears and desires to be exploited. To break these habits, I assemble media fragments (images, videos, objects and literature) that attempt to create confusion and invoke curiosity. These carefully welded fragments of ideas illuminate other realities that rest on the nebulous boundary between the absurd and the rational. It is from this angle of conceptual distortion that our preconceptions, biases, and cognitive habits become known to us. This is a liberating point of view that can open the mind to new sensibilities and empowered awareness. We are the most visually and informationally stimulated culture that has ever existed, and it is in this context that art has a profound mandate to open eyes and minds. This will help keep us attenuated to the immense forces of change at work in our cultures, technologies, relationships and imaginations.

Brent Patterson
2012