Dayzia Terry

Today, despite being aware of the development of technology which not only replicates, but manipulates the senses, the average visual consumer is unaware of the multitude of ways their visual systems are misled on a daily basis. The cultural and societal implications of not understanding how fallible one’s visual system is means that one cannot have full agency over how they perceive their environment--or any choice made using the visual sense. This lack of a filtering system puts the consumer in a dangerous position of engaging with content that only appeals to their biases as the visual system appeals more to belief than reason. By tracing early illusionistic artwork from the Renaissance to the contemporary illusionistic work of John Edmark’s Bloom series or Alma Haser’s photo manipulation series, Within 15 Minutes, we can begin to understand the interdisciplinarity of perception; thus, we can develop a contemporary period eye trained to discern visual manipulation. In my series, Ebb + Flow, I attempt to depict the role of the artist as a puppeteer in the viewer’s phenomenological experience in hopes of highlighting that the relationship between creator and consumer should not be one of unconditional trust.