Rachel Shim

The topic I chose to explore is painting hallucination. As an artist who primarily uses paint, I often find myself submitting myself to the activity. When I am painting, nothing becomes more important than every brush stroke I introduce to an accepting canvas. Despite being a creatively productive activity, excessive amounts of painting may cause a lack of awareness of the time passing. On extreme occasions, sometimes I will hallucinate the world around to be an extension of my canvas. My project dramatizes this hallucinatory state. Through the collection of images, I addressed the fine line between reality and an imagined world, specifically from an artist’s point of view. The physical piece is displayed as a book, inviting the viewer to flip through each frame to fully emerge together. The cover of the book is a part of the pallet paper which I used to create the painting revealed in the third shot. The palette also reveals the artist’s perspective, exposing the artistic choices she had to make. As the book progresses, I layered an additive amount of paint which circles the central photograph. I wanted a viewer to not only recognize the hallucinatory state of the subject, but to invite them to experience the same effect. Getting lost in art does not only apply in the form of creating, but can also be achieved through absorbing. The audience’s experience of an art piece is just as significant as the original intention of the piece. Through the physical additions, I attempted to lure the viewer to interact with the piece and to decipher what is in the physical and what is digital.