Cave painting

Abstract

A tour bus parks in downtown Manhattan. A group of tourists unloads and proceeds to explore the city. An hour later two tourists run into each other on a street in Greenwich Village. One says to the other, “Have you seen the Village?” The other responds, “There’s a Village?” One knew there was a village and knew he knew little about it. The other did not know there was a village. Neither knew they were standing in the middle of it. We constantly sort information. Our brains spend a great deal of time pinpointing what is useful and pertinent amid the ceaseless currents of information. In a culture that increasingly embraces media, we must learn to distinguish not just fact from fantasy, but also the mediated from the actual. Yet, simultaneously, we often accept information (or “facts”) from the media as being part of our collective reality. Over the last few years I’ve become extremely interested in our relationship with reality. Increasingly our experience seems to be processed, translated, and derived. Our interaction with mediated information has escalated to such an extent it’s as if we live almost entirely within a simulacrum. From the caves of Lascaux to Gutenberg’s printing press; from the birth of photography, to the rise of the internet-- Greenwich Village 3 the gaze of humanity has shifted. As a printmaker, I’ve experienced a heightened interest in the process of mediation. In the spring of 2008 I embarked on an enquiry into the history and legacy of visual mediation.