And Therefore I Am

And Therefore I Am takes its title from philosopher René Descartes’s famous statement, Cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” It presents contemporary art about the experience of human consciousness, including thought, perception, and the workings of the mind and brain. The exhibition includes nine artists and... See more 

In The Paradise Institute, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller employ a recording technology known as binaural audio to create the intoxicating, dislocating experience of viewing a short film from within another person’s head. The film itself is a spooky, at times humorous and unsettling series of episodes relating... See more 

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Jochem Hendricks’s Brain of the Artist was created through a collaboration between the artist and Prof. Rainer Goebel, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, in Frankfurt, Germany. It is a 1:1 copy of Hendricks’s brain, based on an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan, output by a... See more 

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Shana Lutker’s Dream Paper records a year of the artist’s dreams, presented in the form of a newspaper. Employing the typographic and page-layout conventions of the daily press, Lutker reports as many dreams as she can recall each morning. Cloaked in the visual rhetoric of “the news,” her meandering dream narratives... See more 

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A number of the works in And Therefore I Am seek to represent through audio recordings, video, or layers of text what neuroscientist Christof Koch has termed “the movie in our minds.” In contrast, Head of a Man with Death on His Mind shows only the exterior of its subject. Peter Campus doesn’t pretend he can know... See more 

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Landers’ use of words in paintings derives directly from his enthusiasm for Surrealism. In particular, his language paintings reflect Landers’ interest in “automatic writing,” a Surrealist practice of rapidly transcribing anything that comes to mind in order to short-circuit self-consciousness and access the workings... See more 

Sean Landers’s word paintings recount the artist’s hopes, fears, musings, and feelings with a directness that is frequently hilarious, occasionally hysterical, and, more often than not, honest to a fault. Landers “says” things in his paintings that most people only think about, and the results are both shocking and... See more 

Working under hypnosis, Matt Mullican created this large drawing in the Tang Museum on February 6, 2006. It continues an investigation of what the artist refers to as “that person’s work”—aspects of his own creative psyche and impulses that emerge only under hypnosis. For the Tang session, which lasted approximately... See more 

Beth Campbell’s “flow chart” drawings begin with real events or situations in her life and proceed to diagram her “potential future based on current circumstances.” Campbell considers two possible courses of action she might take, each leading to an outpouring of possible futures. The bewildering array of potential... See more 

Douglas Gordon’s 30 seconds text. is based on a true story, recorded by a French physician in 1905. In as direct a manner as possible, it questions the essential nature of consciousness, asking what happens when the mechanism of the body no longer sustains the brain. See more 

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