Never Odd or Even & Suspension
Never Odd or Even & Suspension

Jonathan Gilhooly

Spectatorship, Illusion and the Ambivalent Object: an investigation into the relationship between the magic act and contemporary art practice.

Supervisory Team: Joanna Lowry & Andrew Kotting

I want to focus attention, through practice-led research, on the perceptual processes at work when we pay attention to works of art and to examine the complex relationship between artist, artwork and observer.  I intend to use the strategies of magic and conjuring as a methodological tool to crystallize some aspects of these relationships and to make explicit the way assumptions about perceptual processes are embedded in them.

 I am interested in pursuing a recent direction in my work in which I have employed strategies that combine different areas of fine art practice (for example working with some of the principles of painting within the context of an interactive video performance) in order to draw parallels between the consciously illusionistic properties of these media (the optical properties of colour; the 'motion' component of motion pictures).  


At the same time I intend to explore the theoretical areas of the subject, both with regard to recent debate of the role of the museum and gallery in framing  the reception of artworks and to theories surrounding notions of perception and attention.

 
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