Student Gallery 5

Cody Bloom

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The complexity of human behavior and thought is the inspiration behind this work. My interest in this spawned from my involvement with psychology and my understanding of evolution and scientific theory. I draw on my own experiences and interactions with others to develop an understanding behind why I do what I do. I then attempt to apply this to other people, in an effort to analyze their thoughts and actions. My previous work deals with the idea connectivity between individuals. Through these works I began looking for similarities between people, common variables that would allow me to compare and contrast human behavior. This led me to believe that much of what I was looking for in others often went unseen or was never acted out through their behavior. I came to the conclusion that many ideas take place inside the person before they ever create enough drive to motivate some sort of behavior. This pathway led me towards the realm of cognitive and psychoanalytical psychology and I began to analyze behavior more directly, through the theories that these disciplines provide.

Most of my current work deals with the head and facial features directly: the head being the center for both thought and communication. I link the use of figurative elements in my work to the images and diagrams that psychology provides. There also is a certain degree of transparency to the treatment of the subject matter. I use this transparency to imply a sense that the subjects within my drawings are layered. At the same time I bend the rules of the space that contains the subject to distract and blend the layers. All of this uses ink, charcoal and paint, materials that lend themselves to this kind of flexible treatment.

My own thoughts and behavior are easy to decipher, or at least I can present explanations to myself through retrospective analysis that seem plausible. However, when applying the knowledge I gained from observing myself to other individuals, there is a certain degree of subjectivity that must be taken into account. I have to assume that other individuals work the same way that I do to some extent, but I also have to leave room for interpretation to allow for the ambiguity of the idea to impose itself on my audience. In this way this work is a synthesis of all these distinguishably separate, but also linked ideas.