Juli Kirk Image

I'm fascinated by pareidolia, the human ability to see order even when there is none, as manifested by seeing Jesus in your burrito and similar visitations. Largely with the aid of the Internet, a new world of pareidolic possibilities has opened up.

You can find sites that take weird artifacts of NASA's sun-observing cameras and declare them "solar cruisers," or giant UFOs. I once saw the work of a gentleman who believes that ancient rocks were painted with a sort of photo emulsion, offering us snapshots of things like the deck of Noah's Ark. There is a virtual "blobsquatch" industry among Bigfoot seekers with shaky video cameras. And there are folks who peruse NASA images from the moon and Mars endlessly, finding slight anomalies and often declaring them evidence of ancient civilizations, a habit begun in earnest with the pre-Internet "face on Mars" that turned out to be classic pareidolia.

The beauty of this kind of thing, of course, is that it falls prey to the cry of the pseudoscientist: "You can't disprove it!" Of course, science doesn't and couldn't work that way. I mean, they have yet to disprove my theory that post-Doobie Brothers Michael McDonald altered his appearance in the early '80s and revitalized his career with a new name, Billy Ocean, and a new hit, "Caribbean Queen." Go ahead, try to disprove it. I rest my case.

There is a clear tension that exists between pareidolia and art. It could be argued that all representational art short of photorealism is only possible because of pareidolia. Picasso once evoked the figure of a woman with four minimal lines, an effort that counts on human pattern recognition to not only make sense of the lines, but to imagine how the lines would continue if not impeded by the edges of the paper.

The drawing depicts the right half of a nude woman from behind, seen only from thigh to mid-back. Thanks to pareidolia, it's all but impossible to avoid seeing the lines as a human form. It is perhaps more intriguing yet to note that Picasso's drawing evokes an unmistakably female form. It seems impossible to jettison the ability to very quickly form sophisticated conclusions from minimal information (one imagines that innate ability proved particularly useful to early humans in terms of staying alive).

Such thoughts seem to be echoed in the current exhibit at Elusie Gallery in Easthampton, Silent Stories by Juli Kirk, which runs through July 18.

"Portrait commissions and sporting art have kept me working primarily from photographs these last seven years," Kirk says, "and, although that has helped me make a living, I've craved the freedom to delve into worlds of seductive color, pattern and design without the constraints of a photograph or rules of 'reality.'"

As a result, many of Kirk's current paintings push paint into loose abstractions of figures or forms and often ride the line between recognizable and otherwise. Some of Kirk's horse paintings seem at first like pure abstract expressionism, and it is only with a longer look that they reveal that their beauties consist of more than expressionist musings.

Such paintings are, in many ways, far more satisfying than attempts at realism or unhinged non-representation. They're also far less common than either extreme. At their best, they pop back and forth like an optical illusion as pareidolia does its thing, allowing them to function nearly as two things at once. And that's just plain cool, especially since it also makes us see Bigfoot in the garden now and then.