Spheres of Influence, 1997

Inside, Outside
OSA Art Gallery, Ottawa
photo: Chantèle Gervais

As an artist drawn to the geometry, the design of Nature, I am interested in the bilateral symmetry of the human body, particularly, the brain. It marvelous capacity to analysis, organize and synthesis the stimuli from our environments, its vast potential for contemplation, creation and judgment, the charting of human evolution through the hind brain, the midbrain and the forebrain, the cerebral cortex with its convoluted cortical folding (although not as complexly folded as that of the Cetacean brain), the brain is intriguing. However, it is the the bilateralism of the brain, the organization of the brain into two separate spheres of mental operations, one based on verbal language, one based on spatial relations, one of which dominants in Western culture - the one to which I am outside, that I envision. There are many contemporary renderings of the brain in relationship to our mechanistic world: the cyberbrain, the Borg, the disembodied mind. I wanted to visualize an organically based intellect with organic matter, to ground its representation inside Nature, outside the hype of Cyberculture .

Spheres of Influence was a relief mapping the of the left and right cerebral hemispheres with references to the corpus callosum and the reptilian brain, rendered on a physical and metaphorical plane through the exclusive use of organic matter on the floor of the gallery. The brain, long declared as the site of knowledge, sometimes cited as the residence of the soul (garnered from research on the cults of the severed head - mostly cultures of war), is reminiscent of a another organic form, that of a tree in reference to the almost universal metaphor of the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life. Its structure also resembles a seed in the later stages of germination, a seed of potential, the seed of an idea. It also speaks of division, cell division - mitosis, and the division in the function of the two hemispheres into two exclusive spheres of thought, verbal and spatial.