Michael Pittman
About the Work
Much of my recent work has dealt with psychological experience and incongruous relationships between ideas: the fear, joy, anxiety, horror or indifference brought on by outwardly innocuous events or objects; investigating the dramatic difference between the ways that an experience can be perceived. It is a schizophrenic, quasi-diarist investigation into perception.
At their most basic level, the paintings represent excerpts from a journal: the images are records of events coloured by perception – what is of interest to me are the results of this colouring, this reinterpreting. First, if we consider what we remember most vividly, it is often not the world changing, history making events that we hear about on a daily basis, but those events that strike nearest to home (not without some crossover) no matter the triviality or apparent insignificance to others. Take for instance an anniversary or the fulfillment of a personal goal. Secondly, the way that we record these events can be transposed by our unique experience within the particular situation – we remember how we felt at the time of the event, perhaps not an unbiased factual representation of the situation.
On yet another level of personal experience, suppose these “facts” of experience are further transformed by another filter, as they so often are; perhaps that of a psychological condition – depression, mania, anxiety, schizophrenia and any accompanying social context – another layer of interpretation is added to the account. “Accurate” or otherwise, these are records of experience. As unique and specific as these records can be, we can find something archetypical and universal in the way we internalize and store this information.
I see the “layering” of memory, as being akin to my process. It is through these highly personalized transcripts that I attempt to gather my imagery and meaning. The images/experiences often present an air of “strangeness” or “absurdity” due, in part, to their “singularity of vision” – the way in which they sometimes highlight mundane events or objects, but also as a product of my research into the history and philosophy of mental illness; a subject ripe with imagery of fantastical diagnoses and treatments and a consideration of biology and psychology often more supernatural than scientific.
About the Artist
Michael Pittman is a visual artist from Newfoundland and Labrador. He has studied art and art theory in Canada, the UK and Ireland and has been exhibiting internationally for a number of years. Pittman works with multiple media, utilizing non-traditional combinations of materials to create eclectic, multi-layered images; often dealing with personal psychological experience.
