Marguerite MacIntosh and Alex Burton: Arrivals/Departures

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Marguerite MacIntosh and Alex Burton, "Arrivals/Departures," 2018

Please join us for the opening reception at the Fort Gallery on Thursday, August 23 between 7 and 9 pm to meet the artists, Marguerite MacIntosh and Alex Burton and enjoy our celebration.

“Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.” Paul Klee, artist, 1879 - 1940

In the words of Johan Lehrer, an American lecturer and neuroscience researcher, “There is no such thing as immaculate perception.”

When we look at the world around us, at a visual form, at a piece of art, what we “see” is not what emerges from an objective, outside reality but from the mental inventions of our own beings. It is the product of our personal experience, training, cultural bias, and our history of interactions with the world, a personal reality we unconsciously impose on our own sensations. Our perceptions of sight are not a product of a fixed outside reality but a product of our self-created interactional world and are subject to change from day to day, hour to hour. We are continually learning to perceive; to look and absorb, connecting raw perception to what we know and understand. As we engage with a work of art it becomes uniquely our own.

Conversely, for the artist, paintings emerge not primarily from the paint, the light, or the process but from somewhere inside our own minds and depend less on what is outside ourselves than on what is inside.