John Perkins

Artist Statement

 

Saccade Rhythms

 

This Body of work was born of a curiosity about illusion and perception in the hallucinatory netherworld of jetlag.

 

Jetlag always seemed like a place more than a state of mind. The world of jetlag like the travel itself, is where experiences are fascinating yet unfamiliar and confising.

 

It's a place where the upset of wakefulness and rest seem to amplifly the normally imperceptible visual saccades - the name for fast movements of the eye we use unconsciously for locating interesting parts of a scene and building a mental map of it.

 

Especially at night when jetlag was at it's peak Saccades, recreated by camera movement, working in concert with the soft gaze of fatigue create abstractions of form, colour, and composition that become flashes of awareness that are just perception.