Lori Pond
"As I See It" is artist-photographer Lori Pond’s meditation on perception, on how we “see” – physiologically, intellectually, and emotionally. Citing brain research that shows that perception is, first of all, a survival mechanism (“Can this eat me? Can I eat it?”), she documents the order and intensity with which we evaluate what we see. The images in this series start as captures of public-domain oil paintings and royalty-free stock photos and end up radically different, and much more interesting, artworks on their own. The new artworks that Pond makes show that, while perception may start as a survival reflex, there is much more to “seeing” than that. Using her skill as a graphic designer and her masterful handling of Photoshop, she chops and slices, lifts and zooms, and, adding the special sauce that makes her work uniquely her own, she creates new art that is far superior to the sum of its parts.
"This project got started as a result of an epileptic seizure. I came out of the seizure experience realizing my waking consciousness isn’t what is in control of me. There’s a deep, subconscious river of emotion and thought that is in charge. The seizure made me curious about the workings of my brain, and I started to read as much as I could about it to make myself more informed and, thus, less scared of what my brain can do. The series examines and reproduces the fact, according to neurological studies that I've read, that our brains, as a survival mechanism, can only process a few things at a time. Most of the information we take in visually is thrown out."