Exhibition Run: January 18-March 13, 2026
Students in art foundations classes engage in creative actions that challenge them to analyze how they visually perceive the world. The act of creating an illusion of a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface soon brings to bear the complexities of how the mind interprets what the eyes see. As students respond to form, value, and color, they realize that the normal every-day way of seeing is not adequate for artmaking. The casual glances that we rely on for driving our cars down streets do not give us enough information for drawing and painting these streets; Moreover, our casual glances are full of illusions, distortions of perspective, and misjudgments about value and color. The act of artmaking requires that we sharpen our perceptions. We need to look more critically.
There are branches of psychology and neuroscience that focus on visual perception and well-established scientific theories of how the brain processes visual information. Some of these scientific insights have traditionally been a part of visual art pedagogy, like gestalt principles of perception. Gestalt principles suggest that we naturally seek order in what we see, filling in missing information to recognize patterns. Our expectations, based on past experience, can influence or even alter how we interpret what we see.
The two-dimensional artworks in this exhibition engage with visual perception and depict how human minds respond to what is taken in through the eyes and interpreted by the brain. Things get interesting when you take the visual world and run it through the filter of the human mind. You don’t get a flawless and objective mechanical view of the world, even if that is your aim. What you get instead is something that is less outwardly factual and more inwardly personal.
Matthew Watt
Professor of Art & Design
Parkland College
Artists’ Alley, located in the McKinley Foundation, is open daily, 9 AM to 8 PM.