Art lets us be subjective without asking us to commit medieval surgery on the vocabulary of our impressions. Art asks us to meet it with our particular-ness exposed and open. Art changes. It cannot be pinned down. It is un-located. Unreasoned. Unproven.

Meanings change when we receive them through different lenses. Ask any room of people to describe what a Magritte painting means to them and each person will have a different take. Start back at the beginning and yet another set of meaningful observations will arise. We are allowed to move in art. The ecology of our ideas and epistemological limitations is permitted another sort of oxygen altogether when art is the subject.

Art is free to move through culture and time, to reverberate the outlines of a particular moment in history against others that are unmentioned. Art pulls perception toward the differences between light, notes, colour, subjects, framings, ideas, emotions, and stories. Art speaks in relationships. It is relationships. And we are in relationship to it and each other. All this relatedness is a mess of entanglement, shifting impressions and associations. It is, in that sense, alive, much like a pond or a forest. Art is a system of systems, which we enter with our additional systems – our perceptions, our sense, our thoughts and histories, our personal injuries, our educations, our willingness, and maybe our sense of humour.

Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns, 2016