Navigating by Heart

Navigating By Heart- University Gallery, Texas A&M Commerce, Commerce, TX, January 21 - February 11, 2020

Navigating By Heart, II- Studio Gallery, Brookhaven College School for the Arts, Farmers Branch, TX, February 24-March 23, 2020

Consider the relationship between the disintegration of memory and awareness and how we navigate through the world. As young humans, we begin to understand shapes, forms, and relationships that are important. We live with these understandings, build on them, carry a mental database so dense we don’t even think about it most of the time. Time and age obscure this information, turning it upside down, mixing it with incongruous knowledge, muddling even the most familiar into confusion.

            How do we make our way in the world, as our minds age and our ability to recognize symbols become impaired? Often, with grace and ease, we forget things. We don’t know we’ve forgotten, we don’t know that we don’t know and we don’t mind. Conversely, when we do know we’ve forgotten, but can’t make sense of that loss, it is more frightening.

            Buoys and beacons, flags and anchors, are all ways to represent an important place: home, a dangerous spot, a place to take shelter. Atmosphere and weather can blur the path to these things, leaving us stranded and confused, or just going in the wrong direction. We develop new tools, signals, and methods to get from one place, once person, one moment to another.

            Navigating by Heart explores the balance between trying not to forget and trying to be present. This tension is represented in the crests of the ripples radiating from a drop that has already disappeared or at the moment just before the objects in a lens blur and flip from right side up to upside down. This tension is in the surface of a puddle reflecting a fleeting memory in the form of an image or map. It is made visible in the almost imperceptible swell of one surface parallel to another, the ebb and flow of form rising and falling like a mirage, the surface of drawn rings obliterating the image behind, the weight of bells pulling a string taught. There is a balance between the tension and the weightlessness found in the mind’s eye as it treads a well-worn path into a new direction.

-Kelly O’Briant