wishing i could have written this as a mission statement for my thesis...

"We experience life through encounters, images of varied, mostly irrelevant, short experiences: new images, new flavors, new sounds, new touches, & new smells. Yet in their irrelevance they shape the way we think and how we see the world...Actually we are all tourists. We are all part of a new ritual or religion, which is to believe only in what is known and this is what we are told is true. We don't know who we are, and we need to be told where to go and what to see. Museums show the familiar because people seem no longer to be attracted by curiosity or mystery, the unknown or the underground. I remember when I was a kid we used to wander & wonder if we were stepping into a spot in the woods where noone had ever walked. We had this craving to discover the untouched, the unknown. I think we all still have this craving but we cannot satisy it for fear of stepping off the given path of making a mistake. I intend for this exhibition to allow the viewer to enter into a known world to find the unknown, or maybe the other way around, to enter into and unknown world to find the familiar, the known. This dialogue between what is familiar and what is unknown opens & enriches our lives. This show is about experiencing visions and offers the opportunity to reflect and understand the meaning of these visions, but not before your gut has told you something about your experience, which only you can know. A mediated world with mirages, tricks, and look-alike miracles is a difficult world in which to find unique experiences and places. Through media, we are able to be in the same place looking at the same sights, all at the same time everywhere. ..however, (it) aims to be like the woods where we wish to find a spot where no one else has ever been. This discovery is of course an illusion; it is a fiction; and yet this illusion and this fiction can make out lives worthwhile...what is familiar becomes universal. Maybe through this metamorphosis of the familiar into the universal we discover the core of our contemporary existence."

excerpt taken from (p.15-20) an introduction to

"universal experience: art, life & the tourists' eye"

exhibition curated by: Francesco Bonami, Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Tricia Van Eck

published by: museum of contemporary art (chicago, illinois) & d.a.p. (new york, ny) 2005