Reflections on "She Boy, She Devil, and Isis"

I was supposed to go to NYC yesterday to meet with my mentor, but she had to postpone a couple of weeks due to illness. I was looking forward to checking out some specific artists in Chelsea and go to the Met. But instead, I headed in to the MFA in Boston to check out their contemporary art exhibits. Their main exhibit was: She Boy, She Devil, and Isis: The Art of Contemporary Craft, Selections from the Wornick Collection. I found it to be a very interesting exhibit and it helped crystalize some of my thinking about what I'm doing in the studio.

The exhibit was broken into five visual/conceptual categories:

1. The Human Figure
2. Ceremony, Narrative
3. Pattern, Ornament, Texture
4. Organic, Abstraction
5. Materials, Illusionism

It's the bottom three categories that interest me. Even just to consider the juxtaposition of the terms...

My base images are organic in nature and I abstract them (how I shoot them, what I do in my digital darkroom and how I print in layers and paint on top them), turning them into studies of pattern and texture. I've also been grappling with what is the correct material to use as I layer photographic images and then paint over them. What is the illusion I am trying to create? Are they photographs? Are they paintings? And what is the subject? And does it even matter?

In my current work I continually employ techniques to "flatten" the image yet (as in this exhibit) I seem to be very drawn to 3-dimensional work. While I experience the sculptures in their full dimension, I'm also looking at them through a 'flat' perspective. I'm trying to understand the relationship between the dimensions and how to reverse their positions. Can I create the illusion of three dimensions in two dimensions? And I don’t mean through the use of forms and objects in pictorial space, but instead to achieve an alternate dimension only through the use of a “flat” organic and graphic abstraction of texture, pattern and color.