Pareidolia

Maartje Korstanje, Janice McNab, Desiree Palmen

NL is proud to present Pareidolia, a thematic group show of work by three artists whose extremely different practices are nonetheless connected by a phenomenon that is intentionally or coincidentally bound up in their work. 

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon. In its most brutally scientific terms it involves a vague and random stimulus (usually an image or sound) being perceived as significant. As will become clear from works presented in the exhibition, there is nothing vague or random about how these artists have worked with arranging stimuli that rely on the viewer undergoing a complex experience of perception.

Pareidolia is most commonly illustrated in the way in which we might perceive faces or animals in clouds or come to the conclusion that a natural rock formation is, in fact, the head of a giant.  It is also the mechanism through which science seeks to explain its frequent appearance as religious experience over the centuries; marks on cloth becoming the face of Christ in a shroud or the Virgin Mary appearing within the bark of a miraculous tree (or even a tortilla!). And, indeed, science has tried to apply the lessons of observing the phenomena to therapeutics: the familiar device of the Rorschach or ‘ink blot’ test was developed to measure specific thinking and personality tendencies based on what the viewer perceives within the blotches (and perhaps simultaneously demonstrates that even where some aspire to apply the phenomenon of Pareidolia in a scientific way huge questions remain about just how empirical the process is). What is clear, however, is that the phenomenon has a long history of being connected with culturally-loaded social beliefs, particularly of a religious nature, that exist in one form or another in almost all societies. Its roots run deep.

For example, with the art world’s interest in ‘the mimetic’ in recent years, one can’t help ponder the connections between the original Greek notions of Mimesis and the phenomenon. Whilst writers and critics have spent a fair deal of time reconsidering the role of the artist in both ancient Greek and contemporary society to draw on ‘the mimetic’, perhaps the phenomenon of pareidolia in the very development of the idea of Mimesis has been somewhat neglected. In drawing on nature, we neglect at our peril the human tendency to literally draw on nature; to impose the image of something else on what occurs naturally. Ancient Greek mythology is populated with examples that, though arriving with us as texts passed down through the centuries, originate in images. They describe goddesses trapped within trees or sprites inhabiting waterfalls. In considering the phenomenon of pareidolia one can’t help coming to the conclusion that there first existed a real tree or waterfall in which some nascent storyteller saw an image of something entirely different.

In the work of all of the artists in the exhibition, it is clear that they have worked to produce very specific manifest objects – whether painting, sculpture or video- that rely on the reality of pareidolia; that the viewer will see something lying within that cannot simply be accounted for by adding up the sum of the constituent parts. We will all see things that may simply not be there. But, the ferocity of their persistence implies that, on this occasion, it is not only about us and our projected perception.

However, although sharing certain underlying mechanisms, none of the work shown is simply a one-liner in which the device of harnessing pareidolia is used in the way that we often see it used in certain street art or popular visual culture. In the practice of each of the artists, it is a device that is also used to progress her individual artistic discourses or to reflect on her own particular concerns. 

In Maartje Korstanje’s sculptures, we see animal, mineral and vegetable fused within single delicate works made from unusual combinations of precious materials and detritus. Sculptural concerns for form and texture in their purest context are as much of interest to her in what she offers to viewers as directing them to recognise an animal or plant. With oblique echoes of the tradition of the natural scientist or botanist constructing delicate images of nature in all its glory in some distant realm, they also have a certain romanticism about them.

A similar artistic interest in exploring the boundaries between abstraction and the representational has often been a feature of Janice McNab’s paintings in recent years, drawing on everything from art historic precedent –though not entirely obvious from the aesthetic, there is nonetheless a strong connection between her work and that of the Surrealists- to more theoretical painterly concerns with the formal or political feminist intent. In her most recent body of work, the lyrical and poetic images that arise from what is apparently the depiction of something else entirely also have a distinct air of mid-century figurative modernism informing their complex readings.

Desiree Palmen is primarily known for her performances addressing camouflage and the photographic and video works that arise from them. Whilst we instinctively understand camouflage as ‘different’ from pareidolia, perhaps even its ‘opposite’, the reality is that in mechanical or biological terms it is not. The primary difference is a social one; that of intent. Camouflage instrumentalises pareidolia in order for us to not see what is there (which, of course, requires that we see something else). However, in Palmen’s practice, the mechanics of camouflage is only one aspect of the work. Her primary concerns usually involve using the phenomenon to highlight issues such as social identity or the political control of public space.  

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