An Ideal Block

This short film is a meditation on art and perception. How can you really know a thing? How do you know that what you perceive is reality? A thing is an idea before it is a thing.

If a blind person has surgery to restore sight, that person cannot actually see. You have to be taught to see. Vision alone means nothing.

This work was created for the Pro Arts Gallery annual Box Art show. I decided to use it as a metaphor rather than a physical object that I could alter somehow. By photographing it in different ways I altered its appearance without changing the block itself.

That brought up the notion of perception and how much visual information we take for granted. If the wood block only seems to have been changed, what is the point of really changing it? What does the change mean at all?