James Connors
Artist Statement
"Temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events."
– Carl Jung on Synchronicity
"The Artist eye should always be turned upon his inner life and his ear should be always alert for the voice of inward necessity. This is the only way of giving expression to what mystic vision commands"-Wassily Kandinsky
"The spirit of the unconscious always manifests itself when conscious or rational concepts has reached its limits and mystery sets in. Man tends to fill in the inexplicable and mysterious with these contents."
-Aniela Jaffe' from Man And His Symbols
I believe synchronicity, the scaffolding of reality, is the driving force in our lives. Our culturally inherited perception of life has been based on cause and effect. The art I make is a visual interpretation of these realities colliding. Since the human senses are a filter for interpreting raw data through my work I try to depict its first impact on our being devoid of filtration.
Our conscious life is a landscape inhabited with events, matter and perceptions that we innately configure in such a way to understand our situation. This ability to analyze, sort and make sense of our world is a gift of evolution but also of the temporal society and upbringing. It is the malleability of the latter that should remind us that the categories and the logic we depend on are our own inventions. We have created these tools over time to more efficiently navigate and dominate our seemingly spontaneous and uncontrollable existence. This unshakeable reliance on rationality and assumption can also entrap our perception and instinctual inclinations causing physical and mental suffering. Cynicism, melancholy and the general feeling in our society of “something missing” prompts my interest in synchronicity as a forgotten alternative.
Matter, sentient and the inanimate envelope our waking lives. Our consciousness quickly maneuvers through the sensations to offer a quick explanation of what just occurred. But what if the events that took placed happened so fast or in just such a way that our trained mind could not accept the alternative? What if those random and unlikely events occurred meaningfully? What if the tried and true “cause and effect” explanation was not true? This is my passion. Through lines, shapes and blending semi-decipherable matter with expressive forms I investigate the immediacy of our perception.
Sometimes we associate objects with unlikely emotions, impressions with unrelated movement and so on. In our daily life it is expected that we disassociate and ignore unnecessary input to focus on more productive or worthy matters. Those disregarded instantaneous moments are a goldmine of uncorrupted perceptual explosions. Our instinctual unconscious and our rationally-biased consciousness compete for clarity of that bit of raw information and that is what I strive to replicate. Periodically allowing the natural juxtaposition of events and emotions to be treated with worth can be a rewarding as well as necessary for our well-being. Once these quick sensations of unrelated elements are acknowledged and contemplated the possibilities of understanding events at a larger more long term level becomes fathomable. Though we need rationality to cope with and survive in our ever demanding and developing world the credibility of synchronicity cannot be overlooked, doing so would deny us our most incredible of gift, the honesty of our senses.
