JESSE KAMINSKY

By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND

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Jesse Kaminsky hopes to propagate a hoax when he becomes an Artist in Research (AIR) at Dudley Square's Berwick Research Institute next month. The Jamaica Plain-based sculptor will undertake a new series of work that plays with perception and our brains' ability to make sense of the world.

"The viewer will be invited to think about his or her place in the world via these strange, inexplicable interactions with his pieces, but not forced into any conclusions," says Nova Benway, co-curator of the AIR program, about Kaminsky's new works.

As the artist himself puts it, "I'm interested in the mechanisms that people use to perceive the world," "and how those can be altered by your expectations or how they can be manipulated by your surroundings."

On Wednesday evenings, Kaminsky hosts "The Intercontinental," a world music radio show on WMBR. The website for the show exhibits a map of the world with the northern and southern hemispheres reversed; Antarctica is "on top" of the world and so forth. "There's nothing to say that north isn't up, or east isn't up ... there's no up," he says. "The way north and south are is totally dependent on which way you want to navigate," he says.

The works Kaminsky has hitherto created have relied entirely on the process used to make them for their final form. The creative decisions Kaminsky makes in the production of these pieces were actually a series of rules, such as what materials to use and in what fixed dimensions those materials could be in. He then relies on the physical limitations of chosen materials' (metal wire, cardboard and balloons are all favorite media of his) to dictate the shape of the work.

One of those works, a "''"four by four fppt model of a cube sits on the floor of his studio, but because it's made of thin metal wire, it lays almost flat on the dark hardwood floor, collapsed under its own weight. As viewers, we see that the object cannot exist as a true cube, or even come close to it, because of its inherent physical limitations; however, if we were only given the object's dimensions, we'd believe it was a cube.

Though the cube was only a "sketch" of Kaminsky's, it is a microcosm of the work that he'll be devoting himself to in the AIR program. Kaminsky wants to remind us that it is the limitations of our knowledge and perception that define our idea of reality.

"I think that people come up with ideas that aren't true about the way we see the world, but give you more insight into other aspects of perception than just pure [science]," he says. Ancient Greeks believed that sight came from inside and illuminates the world". "Technically that's not true, but it does accurately describe the way the brain works," he says. "Your notion of what the world looks like comes from inside and forms what you're seeing."

JESSE KAMINSKY

OPENING EXHIBITION

TUESDAY 7.08.08

7:30PM/FREE

ARTIST IN RESEARCH

–UNTIL 9.09.08

BERWICK RESEARCH INSTITUTE

14 PALMER ST.

DUDLEY SQ., ROXBURY

617.442.4200

BERWICKINSTITUTE.ORG

JESSEKAMINSKY.COM