Apohenia

About

Apophenia - is a tendency to spontaneously find patterns, connections and meanings in unrelated things. The term was coined by the Germain psychologist Klaus Conrad, he defined it as the ”unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness”.
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds within random stimuli for example when people sometimes see the face of Jesus on a piece of toast or in the grain of a piece of wood. Pareidolia is particularly associated with perceiving faces in inanimate objects (eyes and mouths) and may be linked to an evolutionary need to detect camouflaged predators as well as to recognise the identities and emotional states of those around us.

Wagstaffs latest oil paintings explore the themes around apophenia and pareidolia through deliberate revelation and obfuscation using pattern generating algorithms , selective information removal and subliminal imaging. aimed at confusing, misleading and influencing the viewer.

“ In an image hungry age there is a tendency for people; and I include myself here, to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency. With some of these paintings I wanted to see how much data from the original image could be altered or removed whilst still maintaining its intended character as well as the idea of ascribing meaning to purely abstract forms ”.