"Re-Present" by Sarah Ciampa

Our experience of the outer world is based on our inner world. Our memory of something is not a factual tape, played back to us, but a highly interpretive, dynamic experience—different every time—effected and reinterpreted from one mood or mode to the next. You can listen to a song once and feel uplifted and have one line that means everything to you. You can listen to the same song again and feel desperate longing and hear something totally new. 

In art and life each measure, each line, each act, each gesture is not just a fact that we take in from outside ourselves, but an interpretation and interaction shaped by ourselves at that moment. All consciousness—no separation. 

My newest work, the “Re-Present” series, takes a visual scene and re-presents it through a central painting with companions pieces that are based on parts of the central painting but focusing on different parts, sometimes represented very much the same as the central painting and sometimes changed in subtle ways. This is an exploration of our cognitive experiences in the realm of a visual, still medium, which the viewer is invited to explore and unfold at their own pace.

In a world of AI, machines, copies, and reproductions, our experiences defy an objective reality and subtly, or dramatically, show us subjectivity is everything. Break apart a narrative and it will strike you this way or that on different occasions. The shell is not a shell but an extension of consciousness. Virtual reality is already here.