Saturday 23 August 2014

Pareidolia


Balance I, 2013, 22 x 16 cm, acrylic on card


Public Opening times
23nd August - 14th September / Saturday & Sunday - 10.00 - 14.00

Ralph Anderson, Louisa Chambers, Frances Disley, Jack Foster, Rachael MacArthur, Ellie MacGarry, David Manley, Phoebe Mitchell, Andy Parkinson

Religious figures faces in toast, houses that resemble dictators of the past, clouds that bear the shape of rabbits and other animals. Why do we have a developed tendency to see things that are not really there? Carl Sagan in ‘The Demon-Haunted World’ states:

“as soon as the infant can see it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents. And less likely to prosper.”

Our brains are biologically trained and motivated to recognise patterns. Pareidolia is where there is an illusion or misconception of perceiving something as significant where there really is nothing.
With artwork each viewer brings their own personal understanding of the world, and as a result their reading of the artwork is often different to that of the artist that had created it.

This is a collection of artworks from nine different artists who all have very different sensibilities when creating work. Many of the artist have an interest in visual perception and this is an attempt to see how they sit together. Phoebe Mitchell who is one of the artists featured in this exhibition has in the past created a series of exhibitions that has been based around Apophenia. Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, Pareidolia is a kind of Apophenia.

This exhibition has been curated by artist Matthew Macaulay. For more information on the exhibition please contact matthew@pluspace.com

Address
50 Bishop St, Coventry CV1 1HW, UK

www.pluspace.com

 

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