Artist Statement
Susan Barnett

 

10/31/2010

Psychology tells us that we rely on recognizable patterns to navigate the world of things and ideas. The more familiar a pattern the more we trust our perceptions, but this familiarity also creates barriers to experience. Occasionally, our perception of a visual array fluctuates between readings, and in the space between sensory perception and cognitive understanding a new understanding of reality emerges.

Through painting I explore the laws of perception and the mechanism through which we create reality. Painting elements such as the grid create a cohesive spatial order while providing the opportunity for movement, which registers against its stasis. Color creates relationships and reminds me of the relative nature of perceptual experience. Order, scale, and frequency create the content, the focus, and the narrative.

I am interested in the moment prior to recognition when the space created by color and line is still in flux.  It is a moment of pure potential and freedom and in which change is still possible: before the pattern sets, the form materializes, the content emerges, the concept is formed and our argument is made, and our die is cast.

5/20/2010

Exploring  SUDOKU 

Sudoku is a number puzzle,
Eeewww I don’t like math…
It’s not math; it’s logic.  Sudoku is a system, a Latin Square, a predictable mathematical formula.

If you solve Sudoku like a machine, you quickly bog down in a bewildering set of possibilities.  But take it slow, remain alert, and stealth moves will appear leaping you forward… Zen!  Perfection is possible!

Sudoku is like a 20th Century, faith based view of the world:  there is an absolute (only one right answer). If you try hard enough and follow all the rules you will succeed (Go to heaven?  Become a celebrity?  No finish the puzzle you fool!).  

Sudoku is like a set of rosary beads for the chronically anxious or therapy for OCD. Sudoku is a hedge against Alzheimer’s, a shield to reality.  “Sudoku is diabolically addictive” (New York Post).  Focus on a puzzle and the world evaporates.

Look at three Sudoku paintings side by side, step by step, and you divine there is a pattern.   We humans are programmed to see patterns.  In the paintings numbers become colors, a mathematical idea becomes an object, logic becomes form,  a Latin Square becomes a Modernist painting.

In the digital Sudoku, the painting is translated into animation, back into a schema.  Coding is a weird activity.  It is a language, logical and focused like the puzzle itself.  The mind can’t wander when you code, very different from putting down color with a brush.  There is time (space?) to think when you paint.

The animated Sudoku puzzle solves itself, but its temporal nature surprisingly evades pattern making.  I reasoned introducing time would allow the viewer to experience the frustration, anticipation and cunning of solving a puzzle, but that doesn’t happen.   The compressed time of a video surfaces the absurdity of the system, a postmodern sensibility.  No more are we masters of our fate, this mediated puzzle feels distant: It’s just a puzzle; it’s nothing. 

Sudoku is played with numbers, but I play it with colors.  Numbers (like language) are a higher level, abstracted function, but Sudoku played with color engages our senses.   Color is sub-verbal; our response phenomenological.      

A puzzle, a painting, an animation, “This is really only this”, but they are not the same.