View Spliced Connector group's new summer exhibition, 

Sense Making, at Artsy.net here.



Above: Unfolding Matter

20" diameter, oil paint, mica, Venetian plaster on yupo with 12k gold mounted on panel, .5" thick.

$2,000.

From the curatorial statement:



We are privileged to live at a moment when a new story is being written about how we understand ourselves in the world. The old story said we were all separate from one another; even our bodies separate from our minds. The new story is revealing something quite different.



It’s the whole organism that’s conscious, not just the brain. It’s the whole organism that attends or remembers. The brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, but it’s not the location of it. A bird needs wings to fly, Thompson says, but the flight is not in the w

ings. Disembodied wings in a vat could never fly—it’s the whole bird, in interaction with the air currents shaped by its own movements that takes to the sky.



“The mistake was to think that cognition was in the head,” Calvo says. “It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment.” The same act that keeps a living system living is the act by which, as Noë puts it, “the world shows up for us.”



We show up for the world. We embody, embed, extend, and enact. We are an ecological psychology. And like the octopus with cognition centers scattered throughout its body (each arm has it's own "brain") our cognitive apparatus is also distributed among our sensual capacities.



What does all this have to do with the visual language? For a long time, we believed the experience of the visual language was located in the brain. As with the new story, we are re-membering the sensual delight of experiencing visual art. Though primarily visual, this experience manifests in all our senses. We show up for the world when we expand our understanding of this broad-based experience. The rich network of sensual delights present in this mix of work does what all masterful artwork accomplishes: it shows up for the world, as the world shows up for it.



* Evan Thompson is a philosopher at the University of British Columbia and one of the founders of the enactive approach in studying cognition.

** Paco Calvo, the plant whisperer. Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence W. W. Norton & Co, New York, NY (2023).