Cumuliform
Galerie Steinek, Austria
May. 11 - Jun. 21, 2012
Recent advances in functional MRI technology have allowed us to peer into the mind and its working processes in ways that were never before possible. The idea of actually 'reading one's thoughts' or repicturing images from the mind's eye are a real possibility. But upon closer inspection, the mind is not a literal storage unit like a hard drive, it breaks an image up into component concepts related to various subjects such as sound, motion, gesture, function. For example, the notion of a pencil would be stored as a volumetric shape in one part of the brain, a mark-making gesture in another part, while the sound of the eraser and the smell of the wood shavings during the sharpening process are stored in yet another area. All of this before beginning to decode the
possibilities of what a pencil may write or what it may draw. So truly reading a mind becomes exponentially complicated.
The history of visually depicting thought processes from the early zones of phrenology through to x-rays and psychological flow charts is the inspiration for these collage works. Various characters occupy fields of agency, interacting in dynamic ways reminiscent of human relationships treated as a kind of chain reaction, potentiated by overlapping zones of influence. In this work Oursler uses printed images with drawn and painted images to suggest a hierarchical relationships.