MARK C. STEVENSON
Ishmael
Call me
PERCEPTION • AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
Call Me Ishmael asks where subject and meaning originate.
The title invokes Melville’s opening line, “Call me Ishmael,” an instruction that establishes conditions disguised as a statement of fact. In the same way, the series presents the subjective as if it were objective, exposing the viewer’s role in the production of context and meaning.
Call Me Ishmael is not a collection of individual paintings, but a contained perceptual system. Across the sequence, the work establishes familiar visual cues, then destabilizes the conditions that make those cues feel reliable. Meaning does not reside fully within any single image. It is produced through the viewer’s search for continuity, subject, and coherence across the series as a whole.
(FOR FULL SIZE, CLICK ANY IMAGE)
HOW THE SERIES WORKS
The work operates as a contained perceptual system that establishes, then unsettles, the conditions that enable recognition. Individual paintings introduce familiar cues, branching forms, tonal depth, atmospheric space, allowing the mind to assemble a plausible subject. Across the sequence, those signals become less stable, oscillating between what appears known and what must be searched for. Viewers may return to works that initially seemed to confirm their assumptions and discover that those assumptions no longer hold. Spatial cues flatten, structures dissolve, and the visual evidence supporting recognition becomes less certain over time.
What first seemed to reside securely in the image begins to feel inseparable from the viewer’s own pattern-seeking. Subject and meaning are not simply found in the work. They emerge through the exchange between image and perception.
The series explores how interpretation takes shape by appearing to offer a stable subject, then gradually unsettling the terms on which that stability depends.