Models of Reality

We often assume that perception gives us direct access to the world. Yet what we experience is shaped by the brain’s attempt to organize incomplete and ambiguous sensory information into a coherent model of reality. Because this process is remarkably successful, the model becomes invisible. We end upmistaking interpretation for the thing itself.

A photograph seems to confirm this transparency. A cloud, or a wave appears simply to be there, faithfully recorded by the camera. But photography is already a system of selection and translation: framing, perspective, exposure, and digital processing all shape what can be seen. And of course, it is just one moment in time. The image is not the world but one possible description of it.

My work begins with this tension. By layering photographs with pixelated grids, architectural fragments, weather diagrams, and other graphic systems, I introduce competing ways of organizing information about the world outside our heads. These layers do not explain the image; they reveal the interpretive structures through which meaning is produced.

I am not trying to uncover a pure reality hidden behind representation. Rather, I am interested in the moment when the machinery of perception becomes visible; when we recognize that seeing is an active process of construction, and that every image is also a model through which the world becomes intelligible.