Memory and Perception

“Into the Woods,” by Alexander Korzer-Robinson

“As we remember the books from our own past, certain fragments remain with us while others fade away over time – phrases and passages, mental images we created, the way the stories made us feel and the thoughts they inspired. In our memory we create a new narrative out of those fragments, sometimes moving far away from the original content. This is, in fact, the same way we remember our life – an ever changing narrative formed out of fragments. This mostly subconscious process of value judgments and coincidence is what interests me as an artist and as a psychologist.”
--Alexander Korzer-Robinson

Although as he cuts he leaves the images in the place they would have been found in the book, he creates a new relationship between those images by directly linking them, removing the many pages of text and images in-between, by putting a spotlight on them, by bringing them out of the author’s context and into the sculptor’s, and then into the viewer’s. The images, stripped of the text and the order of relation that the original author had given them (unless you consider the Original Author to have been the Creator of the Universe), are given a new relational order by the sculptor that means something to him but will easily stir completely different associations from any viewer, based on books they have read—because of the format--, as well as on their own experiences.


I am, of course, a sucker for old castles that instantly take my mind to tales of haunted families and grimly obsessed, fearfully driven scientists...



And the above image made me think of the discovery of the New World, right off, even though the man pointing forward and coming out of the dense foliage is, upon closer scrutiny, dressed like an old Roman. The “old ways” are small, beneath him; he heads fearlessly over them, a giant...


“Suspended Lion,” by Alexander Korzer-Robinson

There are so many different perspectives in the above image: the giant lion, heading downwards, the buildings facing one way, the book facing another, and then the topographical view, the map, offering yet another—this one brought me back to all the thoughts of physics and the many, many worlds all occupying the same space at the same time...the idea that we pick and choose what we see, what we even notice, what we *live*...



And this one? What does it make you think of?