Ghosts: Perception, Painting, and the Index

How does one form a meaningful, generative understanding of the one’s surroundings in contemporary society? Currently, social media and portable electronics appear to serve widely as methods of filtering and segmenting the world around us into easily consumable portions. What is at stake in this kind of mediation and what role can visual art take in encouraging the formulation of knowledge based on primary, rather than prescribed, modes of perception? This paper examines the potential of primary experience in daily life and the hypothesis that modes of perception normally associated with the appreciation of art can be made use of in the context of daily life. Through using established methods of representation, such as painting, to reframe normally unremarkable entities as valuable art objects, the artwork discussed aims to transfer ways of looking at art into the realm of daily life. This fracturing of perceptual conventions is strengthened through the use of the index as a tool of conceptual expansion, directly connecting art objects with the subjects they represent and the processes with which they were made. Working from the pedagogical theories of Joseph Albers, and Rosalind Krauss’ writing on the index and the flatbed picture plane, this research attempts to lay a pathway for the continuation of an investigation of direct perception as a tool of knowledge production. My research is placed in relation to the work of Gerald Ferguson, Ellsworth Kelly and William Anastasi. In looking at the artwork that I have produced over the course of the Emily Carr University of Art + Design Master of Applied Art program, this document is a record of a variety of attempts to trigger the modification of customary patterns of comprehension and the generation of more intimate understandings of our immediate surroundings.