Is the eye intricately connected to the "I"? Ideated as a sphere, such a slippery object may exist simultaneously within and without us. Although the nature of this blurry separation is normally beyond our intuitive grasp, Heidi May and Sean Alward's current work tasks itself with just such a relation between subject and object. Sharing interests in pictorial consumption and the phenomenology of perception, their work questions how images contribute to a sense of self, reality, and order.

Sean's painted portraits coagulate the process of creating and contemplating an object d'art. These images use a series of photographic self-portraits by Art Informel artist Wols. Here an inebriated Wols assumes six rather indeterminate facial expressions. They seem to range from soporose indifference to a jovial smile. Blending his own physiognomic features into hand painted renderings of these photographs, Sean calls attention to cognitive and physiological interaction with imagery. It is akin to an audience dialogue that Tom Sherman describes as "an intuitive, subjective process verging on psychic identification" 1. The interface between self-portrait, and the self-portrait it has sourced, suggests the construction of meaning for both object and subject, and tangles the boundaries of these coterminous concepts.

The blurry separation between these oppositions recalls the rhetoric of High Modernism. The suspension of objecthood lauded by Michael Fried elucidates the phenomenology of one's experience with an object of so-called art. This modernism is predicated on a subject's conviction for the continuous "presentness" of object-less objects 2. Here however, it is the connection between an undefined, possibly unbounded subject and object that is of interest, rather than a transcendent and universal unity between the two. Sean's utilization of photographic self-portraits by an artist known for abstract painting suggests a literalist and narrative reading of even the most modernist abstraction. Likewise, the Karaoke drawings are comprised of representational portraits alongside gestural abstractions inspired by the sitter.

In Sean's paintings the consideration of subject/object relations is further encouraged by the disconcerting inter-textuality of various historical figures and the personal narratives that constitute selfhood. Decentred and uncertain, the eye/I glances into a grid of fluctuating visages that seem ambiguous in terms of gender, inebriated, and mentally handicapped all at once. Their subjects include the self-portrait and the subjectivity and portraiture of others. Indefinate and hybrid identities discourage the illusion of these representations. The subtleties of veracity within portrait photography also surface. The "Photograph/Mirror Hybrid Paintings" render the scratches and dust of this medium in paint. The viewer faces, before the face of the portrait, a mirror of allusions to the interpretation of pictorial illusion. This facilitates a (self) reflexive series of portrait feedback that circulates as we alter the picture with our own perspective. Karaoke portraits sketch an engagement with the other as self, as participants re-produce a variety of others in their image. As the image is transformed by us, so too are we transformed by the image. Such an uncertainty principle within the science of perception is manifest in Sean and Heidi's contiguous practice.

Where once "the oppositions subject/object and public/private were still meaningful" Baudrillard posits that "a screen and a network" has replaced "the scene and the mirror. 3" Attentive to risks of a dissipate selfhood, Heidi figures the complex inter-network structuring our visual-perceptual field. An interest in the human psyche and the vulnerable subjectivity of decoding objects is manifest in "Through the Signs". These large digital prints superimpose organic matter, body parts, and computer templates in an abstract manner that recalls modernist painting, and by extension, its preoccupation with the subconscious. This series pares down the formal qualities of the techno-aesthetic, such as a websiteÕs colour templates, symbols, and icons. Distilled in this way, these qualities appear most meaningful as we realize the invisibility of that which is so familiar to us. Concern arises when considering the ingestion of information simplified to symbols and mediated through various visual systems slick with the novelty of the new. Erroneous assumptions about the neutrality and beneficence of the information styled by "radical" technologies recur with familiar frequency. The glance mode of image consumption is encouraged by the forms and norms of intimate everyday gadgets. It is precisely this "televisual experience" that Heidi so terms as particularly significant to our evolving subject-formation and self-development 4.

Coping with the imposition of mediating devices often means escaping into the very aesthetic environment that is increasingly calculated to manipulate oneself at escalating amplitudes. Sherman links information overload to "perceptual disorganization and disorientation" and an exhausting physiological dependence upon stimulation 5. The dissolution of self among criss-crossing networks is not without its emotional disturbances. In mock therapy, Heidi collages the mechanics of perception and pictorial consumption within the series "Mental Note; Its Not You". Diagrams, absent minded sketches, and loose text, explore how we are wired, and what we are wired to. Here the outline of Larry King rests his head at "the core of spiritual awakening". TV talk show icons such as Jerry Springer, Dr. Phil and Oprah, mingle with the frantic scrawl of pop psychology:

                            They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water but the voice of life, the voice of being,
                            of perpetual becoming...

                            What's going on inside me? Don't analyze, just wacth...

These mental blueprints detail the contradiction of navigating psychological survival amidst industrial models of identity and struggle put forth by the consciousness industry. Constantly redefined by changing physical and social contexts, reductionist "truths" of simplicity and nature rarely satisfy the desire to locate ourselves in multiple mental moments. Communicating with others in shifting and fragmentary circumstances must first demand the recognition of uncertainties.

Heidi's hypnotic video frustrates an imaginary escape into representation, simplicity or nature. The tangible illusion of rippling water is effaced by interfering waves of static. The mutilating effect of technical imperfection and scrambled self-help phraseology contests the authenticity of "tech-knowledgy". We catch our vulnerable tenderncy to drift into the screen, absorbed in the illusion of reticulating waves of water. Oprah is construed to remind us that representational techniques may rise in response to ideological requirements: "That's the journey weÕre on/get yourself a TV/authentic power".

If Heidi's work with digital media displays an apprehension for our fantasies about the future, Sean's may be said to exhibit fictions that form our past. The subjectivity of perception and identity formation is evident in indistinct historical figures, and inarticulate fragments of self-help script. As "perceptual and social scientists" 6 a rtists may be particularly interested in the construction of identity before images contemplated as art, or glanced on a screen. Approaching indecipherability, the imposition of TV static, enlarged pixilation, and blended portraits portray permeable boundaries of a dissipated self. The oscillations between subject and object pulse as we engage in a circumfluent process that transforms image into idea into self.

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