10/7/2013 In common usage, the word Doppelgänger is understood to describe someone that looks exactly like another person. Directly translated from German, the word means “double goer.” Its origins are lost in folklore, but the root meaning had more metaphysical connotations than we generally understand today. A doppelgänger was a ghostly apparition of a living person, a supernatural body-double. The implications for anyone who witnessed such a sight were sinister. If you saw someone’s specter, it was understood to portend bad luck, if you saw your own double it was said to be an omen of death.
Recent neurological studies involving electro-stimulation to the left temporoparietal junction of the brain have produced doppelgänger sensations in the patient-participants. When this area of the brain was disturbed, the integrated sensations of self-image, body position and location were disrupted and replaced with an awareness of a foreign presence or a copy of oneself sensed nearby. These studies also associated certain mental illnesses like schizophrenia with lack of function in that same region of the brain, and suggest our conception of the self is wholly dependent on complex and fragile electrochemical functions.
In my latest series of paintings, I am interested in exploring the theme of the integrated self by looking at the internal dualities and contradictions of personality. In my thinking, it is entirely possible that the “self” can be a tangled composite of bio-chemically charged neurons, culturally inherited biases, and spectral hauntings. These paintings are my attempt to suggest some of those connections. Several of them, such as the one above, are “double portraits” depicting the conflicting states of being that can coexist in a single person. By picturing my subjects as their own dopplegänger, I am envisioning a meeting of the self with the self, and using that interaction as a dramatic jumping off point for each painting.
This show will premier at Walker Fine Art in Denver, Spring, 2014. Please join my mailing list to receive an invite with full details.