Quaternity SeriesI am interested in the production of meaning and insight that occurs through the interaction of diverse knowledge repositories using found images and fragments. The subject matter within my work ranges widely, however, my main concern has to do with the relevance of aesthetic considerations within fields of knowledge and practice situated at the margins of traditional allopathic medicine. During the last year I built a body of work that derives from an exploration of certain concepts from a genre of psychotherapy that could be considered by some as a niche, cult or marginal cultural artifact. In his pioneering work on the unconscious through art making, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung had his patients draw their dreams. Jung regarded these psychological expressions of the self as mandalas. He studied hundreds of mandala dreams and found that these commonly reflected a structure related to the number four, a phenomenon he termed “quaternity”. Jung believed that the spontaneous production of these quaternary images fosters individuation, a process of transforming one’s psyche by bringing the personal and collective unconscious into consciousness. Reportedly, individuation has a holistic healing effect on the person, both mentally and physically. I am interested in the potential heightened consciousness of self and other that quaternary structures may be able to elicit in both in the producer and viewer, as quaternities relate to the symbolism of psychic wholeness that appears in dreams and in the imagery of myth and folklore. I define my quaternities as aesthetic formations conceived with four parts that act as mnemosynes. This method relies on producer and viewer interfaces that are inherently ludic and connect with primal image navigational systems. I specifically utilize strategies of image production and manipulation that are common to medical imaging and psychological testing, which include juxtaposition, pattern recognition, mirroring, inversion, splicing, masking, and staining. Like in many archetypal quaternities, two elements are almost identical, a third element is recognizably akin but different to the first two, and a fourth element is a complete outlier.
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