The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. Marcel Proust | In Search of Lost Time I have been using Instagram for about a year now. It has become a valuable visual notebook, a quick way to document the visual moments that catch my eye: light and shadow; color and surface; transition, line and form. I love the freedom of capturing these inputs without necessarily analyzing them. No need for a coherent written narrative on Instagram. For me it's about seeing the ordinary in a new way. And about realizing that even in an urban landscape, there are infinite visual inputs that can lead to new ideas and art. Synthesis comes later as these visual inputs accumulate and themes emerge and compositions come to mind. My work centers around finding the points of intersection between the built and natural worlds, so my own concocted hashtags include #beautyinnature #natureinthecity and #structureinbeauty.
This past winter psychoanalyst Dr Virginia Barry invited me to develop visuals for her book on the neuroscience behind Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. One of my first thoughts after reading Marcel Proust's Swann's Way was that Proust would totally get Instagram. In Search of Lost Time comes as close to "following an instagram" feed as one might hope to find in an early 20th century autobiographical novel. Of course Proust goes far beyond an Instagram feed with his sheer brilliance in using language to reconstruct these elaborately detailed and intricately layered sensations and memories, creating an entirely new work of art. But I like to think that Proust would approve of the vast array of visual moments captured on Instagram which have the potential to extend our collective cultural memory in new ways, and will undoubtedly lead to new art.
Come join the adventure on Instagram