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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Peter Max! Hey!
...or maybe pianos, but I'm not too sure of this yet.
Brain Science Podcast with Dr. Ginger Campbell is soooo good! If you like brain science. Dr. Campbell is really good at keeping lay people in mind. She does great interviews and always gets her subjects to define terms and explain tricky concepts.
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Karilee Fuglem- here within our curving spaces at The Koffler Gallery, 4588 Bathurst St., Toronto.
Opening: Thursday, May 15, 6 - 8pm
A continous thread 2005 fine nylon thread (details)
I have been learning some groovy things about colour lately. I always knew that certain surfaces reflect and absorb various light rays in the spectrum. What I didn't know was that our brain reads colour as a set of ratios, rather than absolute values. So, according to neuroscientist Semir Zeki, green reflects 70% of middle wave (green) light and 20% of incident long wave (red) light, no matter what the amount of light. We compare all the values and the knowledge we get is about the reflectance of the various surfaces. Colour, according to Zeki, is an interpretation of that knowledge. [Semir Zeki, “The Neurology of Ambiguity,” in The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, Turner, Mark, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) p.251]
Also, I learned a new phrase: scene gist. It means, guess what, getting the gist of a scene. We can do it really very quickly, and we can get scene gist even if we don't have time to identify any of the objects in the scene. Monica Castelhano has worked on the role of colour in scene gist. Structure tells us a lot, and so we can get the gist pretty effetively from black and white images. But Castelhano found that if the images are blurred, or the time they are shown is reduced, to the point where we have problems, then colour helps us out. One of the things that the brain does to be efficient is look for edges and boundaries, filling in surfaces automatically. Colour helps with this definition of shapes. But Castelhano and her team wanted to see if it had another role besides emphasising structure. They set up an experiment showing people scenes with natural colour, versus scenes with unnatural colour that nonetheless enhanced the structural qualities. People were able to get the gist better from the natural colour. [Castelhano, Monica, "The Influence of Color on the Perception of Scene Gist," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2007]
From Semir Zeki, I also learned that we form a colour memory, learning from experience what colours are associated with what forms. Seeing natural colour in a natural environment activiates the hippocampus (which works on memory) and other parts of the brain that are involved with high level cognition. When we see abstract colours in a painting these areas are not activated. Says Zeki, "...abstract scenes do really seem to affect early visual areas without eliciting activity from areas which are active only when we view natural scenes." I'm thinking, though, that if we start trying to figure out what those abstract colours might mean, or whether our kid could paint that, then the frontal lobes are going to get involved pretty quickly.[Semir Zeki, Inner Visions: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) p.201]