ABOUT
“WE DON'T PERCEIVE THE WORLD AS IT IS BUT AS IT IS USEFUL FOR US TO DO SO” Anil Seth
Kaye McGarva is an award-winning artist based in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. Her Crease paintings are not only unique and beautiful, they also explorations in perception and the embodied nature of vision. Since graduating art school in 2014, Kaye has been exhibiting widely through out New Zealand, Europe and the UK.
statement
I take my inspiration from many things including nature, philosophy and the Op art movement of the 60’s. I really enjoy novelty, creating illusions and fooling people.
My paintings are minimalist and meditative. They are intended to be spare and ambiguous to allow more room for the viewer to invest them with their own meaning. It is more about what is going on within that person and less about what is in front of them.
In Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception,“ after his consumption of an hallucinogenic, the author’s concept of creases takes on a profound significance for him. They become portals, offering glimpses into the hidden dimensions of existence that are inaccessible in ordinary states of consciousness. I like to think my work offers the viewer the potential to experience that.
Perception
Anil Seth says our brain takes a "best guess" approach to interpreting sensory data, so we don't necessarily see things as they are, but are influenced by our past experiences, expectations, beliefs, as well as cultural factors.
My paintings have an illusion of spatial depth that can test the brain’s ability to read them correctly as two dimensional. Above are two images of the same painting titled, Luminous. The shadowy forms that once appeared convex in the first image change to looking concave (or vice-versa), when it is rotated 180 degrees as in the second image. At some point in the rotation the forms seem to keep switching from one state to the other in a permanent loop. This phenomenon, which can cause a sense of unease or even disequilibrium in the viewer, is the body’s a reaction to the misinterpretation of what the eyes are seeing.