Jesse Browner
John Berger taught us that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” This work reminds us that all art is in essence abstract. If it appears to represent something that exists in the empirical world — that is, something we believe we know and recognize — that is only a trick the brain plays on the eye. We know from our own experience that when the eye is confronted by a plane of color or form that the mind, in its desire to protect us from unknown dangers, is not able to identify immediately, the eye flits and hovers restlessly above it, looking for a perch like a bird in a storm. It grows uneasy; it cannot settle. We experience its disquiet as a tension that we have evolved to seek to palliate. The brain says, “Keep looking.” Moser says, “Welcome home.”