The Artifice of Nature The Nature of Artifice Curator's Essay David Newman Gallery Director . I am not claiming that rightness in the arts is less subjective, or even no more subjective, than truth in the sciences, but only suggesting that the line between artistic and scientific judgment does not coincide with the line between subjective and objective, and that any approach to universal accord on anything significant is exceptional. Nelson Goodman 2 Experiences are ephemeral, consisting in perceptions.
Memories perdure, subsisting in the retentions and transformations of experiences.
From experience art arises. Dornith Doherty's photographs are positioned in a liminal zone of discourses between the found and the made, the discovered and the invented, the subjectivity of individual experience and the intersubjectivity of experience commonly shared. The layering, the sedimentation, of images and things in Doherty's works are formally analogous to the temporal as the form of sensibilty. 6 Doherty's works site the mediation between nature and culture within the motif of the landscape, itself a cultural construction 7 in distinction from the pregiven unconstructedness of terrain. As with Heidegger's distinction of 'world' from 'earth,' 8 the distinction of landscape and terrain entails the respective presence or absence of human agency.