Emilie Dashe
External Consciousness by Emilie Dashe
My project entitled External Consciousness was started in Micol Hebron's class, Art and Spirituality, where I decided to map my spiritual understanding of my own subconscious over an extended period of time. As the semester ended, I continued the project because of the monumental importance of what I was starting to discover. The idea was to conceptualize an inconceivable aspect of my own psyche that would start from an introspective and personal place and extend outwardly by relating to a universal understanding of the human spirit. There’s a profound power in the way that subtle daily efforts can create monumental change. The goal of this project is to create a body of work that is in dialogue between inconceivable chaos and visual representation.
My purpose is to understand the power of the subconscious in daily increments over a large period of time—a period that initially was created by enforced confinement due to the pandemic—so as to further my understanding of innate human spirit over time. In an era of social media that has broken our sense of time and space, with the recycling of information and data to an endless degree, this work is relevant and urgent within the context of defining a period that has lost its sense of time and been set apart from all other periods in history. I started this project in my studio apartment as a way to cope with what I was experiencing through confinement. In a physical sense, my room and studio and living area has all been conflated to the same space, which has inherently affected the way I conduct my practice.
The paintings became a daily ritual that kept track of how I was feeling through color and gestural movement. When I look back at them now, it is clear that they are an index of something much greater.
The effect of time cannot be defined, understood or conceived in one single moment. Time can only be conceptualized through the visual accumulation of moments. This project facilitates the intersection between art and science by forming a new understanding of how we perceive and conceptualize the passage of time through periods of social chaos.
