“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world… the rest of the world calls a butterfly”~ Lao Tzu.

My project is about perception. The way you perceive your world directly affects how you live your life, how you act, how you feel; everything. No two people perceive their surroundings in the same way. Even people who live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, and share the same memories perceive things differently.


For this project, I wanted to make a visual representation of this concept. In order to achieve this I used an image of trees I had captured using 35mm film. The process of capturing the image lends itself to this concept. The image is one unlike nature. What is perceived by the naked eye is not what was perceived by the lenses. To further explore this concept, I cropped multiple views of this same image in different fashions. It is obvious to the viewer that this series of five images are somehow related. They all have the same movement and same patterns; yet each individual image offers something different to the viewer. Each image is a different view of the whole picture.


I hope for these images to capture the attention of viewers. I hope they find them interesting, beautiful, and thoughtful. More than anything, I wish for them to provoke discussion. It isn’t so much important that they understand my initial concept. I realize these are abstract and I am curious how they “erceive” them. For display purposes, I think it would be interesting to have a place for people to write there interpretations as a continuation of my concept.


“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” ~Edgar Degas