Sophisticated Cherries

Sophisticated Cherries
http://www.ccca.ca/mikidot/photo/cherries_05/

These are not advertising photographs, even if ads are culture.
Culture's a thing in the making, a weave through time of current
opinions, fads, movements, ideologies, allegiances, networking. Yet
through the interaction of such instinctive behavior, we see a
certain direction for conceptual thought at the start of the 21st
century.

Chaos theory, string, sync, and link theories, new media and time
based arts, surveyance and database-driven concepts, these point to a
search for patterns in human behavior, patterns or structures based
in nature, biology and physics, for universal and verifiable
paradigms we can trust and rely on.

Yet there's a spiritual aspect to consider. Quality of life,
intellectual and emotional refinement, sophisticated discernment are
all spiritual aspects, pushing beyond basic matter to include the
complex richness of individual perception at any given moment in
local time.

We care how others lived, the myths they followed, their character,
personality, the way they looked. From this matrix we construct
cultural sets, judgements to recognize our similarities and
differences. We reflect on who we are, where we are, and where we're
going.

Our lives have a public and a private side and this body of work is
about the private and personal. Sophisticated Cherries is about when
you're by yourself. Preparing lunch, setting the table, washing
fruit… then you see fractals in the water as it clings to cherries.
Another world is revealed beyond the mundane and banal, known and
understood.

With close-up lenses the camera bring us closer to a microscopic
world which reawakens the curious psychology of imagination and
projection, of anthropomorphic speculations. There's a transcendant
feeling, an operatic grandeur as we recognize in this microcosm the
patterns and structures of our normal scale… yet because of this
difference in scale we also see a landscape born of our expectations.

This work parallels contemporary themes about social presence, such
as Sorel Cohen's "Le Rite Matinal", a matrix of nine images showing a
person making a bed, shot with long camera exposures which blur the
woman, emphasizing movement through time. What made "Le Rite Matinal"
a seminal work was in the way it revealed the personal as a
fascinating source and subject of contemporary art.

In Sophisticated Cherries we no longer see the protagonist, we're
seeing through his or her eyes. The movement is not through time but
space, that 360 degree sphere separating us from the external world;
the content or agenda is the legitimization of personal experience as
source and subject of creative activity. This work shifts the
conceptual focus from a relationship and attitude towards the outside
world back to the subject, the person seeing the world from a space
within.

We care because we have certain instincts based in cellular and
chemical biology, in specialised brain cells whose functions give us
concepts of quality, judgements between fascinating / boring, ugly /
beautiful, attractive / repulsive. Mathematicians say we recognize
the importance and stability of an equation by the fundamental beauty
of it's structure. Quality is a projection; we see quality in objects
yet the judgement is made in the observer; we recreate the world
according to our expectations.
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+Miklos Legrady
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310 Bathurst st.
Toronto ON M5T 2S3
416-203-1846
647-292-1846
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-website;
http://www.mikidot.com
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