Dean Cercone, “Ode to its Cortex and its Illuminated Manifestations”TRICIA MACKENZIEArtists tend to resist the idea that creativity has a cause—that the inspiration to produce original work can be isolated or reduced to some elementary physiological process, like a chance firing of neurons. Decades of neuroimaging research support their resistance of that notion, having raised more questions than answers about what spurs the creative process.
But curious researchers have come up with creative ways to investigate art and the brain. And such curiosity meets creativity in a lively and arresting way in “illuminated dissolved humanity cortex manifestations,” a collaborative exhibition-experiment co-led by Tricia MacKenzie, being held at the Inter Space gallery she runs in New York City. As part of the exhibition, painter Dean Cercone dons an EEG headset that records his neural activity while he goes about his work.
Cercone’s paintings are chaotic yet contained, combining bold acrylic lines with splashes of spray paint, conveying dreamlike expressions of the subconscious and the archetypal. Some, like “Ode to its Cortex and its Illuminated Manifestations,” are overt nods to MacKenzie’s experiment, depicting a human head full of colorful abstract shapes suggesting ...
