Artist Focus -- Jason E. Lewis

In his work Nine on The Thought Shop, Jason Lewis presents the viewer with a unique form of narrative. He introduces the viewer with an extensive, to the point introduction, explaining that the images and the text are representations of the artist's life. The viewer is to click and drag to move the images within the grid, which causes the text to shift and the images, in their individual and movable cells, fade and shift to become other images. Lewis states that his ambitions in this project are to bring into focus the idea of a nonlinear life, one marked by "demarcations, shifts in place, shifts in community, shifts in attitude" that act in persistent memory as cornerstones to new "lives," as it were. These important memorial demarcations are well-photographed but enlarged or slightly abstracted images of landscape, faces, maps, objects, trees. As the participant moves through the images like one of those puzzles with the sliding tiles (what ARE those things? do they have a name?), the pictures fade rapidly and randomly into other images. As they are moved, the text in the one empty spot always occurs in the same order. At first, I was hesitant to move in too random of an order, in case I messed up the narrative in the text; however, the more I moved around the image tiles, the more I found that the phrases presented themselves in the same chronological order no matter how I arranged the images.

It's a legitimately interesting idea of memory and reality that Lewis deals with in this project; in presenting the story in the same chronology but the "memory" images in a highly variable combination each time the viewer interacts with it, Lewis confronts the viewer with a very tangible sense of objective memory one can realistically bestow on a listener (the text) and subjective, mutable memory thought accessible only to the thinker (the images). I'm reminded of the Cubists attempts to capture the process of sight in their paintings; the presentation of fractured image, according to some of the writings of Braque and Picasso, were to infer the fact that we take in objects bit by bit, with each bit magnified and specialized in its own way. Although cerebrally, this process makes sense, the Cubist paintings lose a lot of this notion when standing on their own. In a way, Lewis's work achieves a concept of thought and memory process better and more conveyable than the Cubists were able to achieve. I think it's the fact that the temporal dimension was introduced is what sets this work apart in terms of readability; as the story progresses in the set way, the non-negotiable way, the images change, ebb and flow like clouds. It is the fact that we can chart the change, that we ourselves utilize memory to explore this consciousness, that we can understand the dual processes of thought. It is owing mostly to the new media setting that this is really conveyable.

Personally, I like the fact that different arrangements have significantly different emotive messages. When we rearrange the images, the change and form their own gestalt, which has its own emotion and its own message regardless of the repetitive text: some are calm and serene, some seem cold and unfamiliar, others a little intimidating. In this way, I can see why Lewis chose to consider his piece "poetry" in the intro description.