When The Light Tricks The Mind

The profile, of a cartoon crone, is easy to see — easier than seeing what it really is. Keep looking and you might see other faces as well. But keep looking, and you see that it’s all something else, that your mind is finding patterns, meaning, in a chance encounter. ​“I was walking around in Rochester one day, and before crossing a street, I looked to the right, and down at the end of the alley was a shiny truck door reflecting the distorted image of the building across the street,” Sven Martson notes. ​“My point of view was all important. Just a few inches to the right or left and the image broke up and disappeared.” It’s only a reflection of a building. But it also reflects something else, in the way we find so much else in it.

The image is an example of pareidolia, or as Martson states, ​“the tendency to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.” Finding faces is common — just look at the man in the moon. ​“There’s much conjecture about why people see identifiable faces, animals and shapes in random patterns, but it seems the brain is wired to notice or look for something recognizable,” Martson states. 

For example after example, drop by Kehler Liddell Gallery at 873 Whalley Ave. for Martson’s photo exhibition, titled ​“Pareidolia,” running now through Oct. 6. ​“It’s widely thought that the brain is primed to see faces (the most common form of pareidolia) and is a product of our evolution. I’ve exhibited several examples that have fascinated me recently. I hope you find them as interesting as I have found them compelling.” 

The entire exhibition offers, first, the surface delight of seeing what Martson saw in each of the images. Often it’s faces. Sometimes it’s something else, as in this plant whose space is uncannily like that of a torso. In some cases the images are intricate enough that it’s possible multiple viewers will see multiple faces.

At this surface level the photographs are a testament to Martson’s keen eye for finding the shapes, and for being able to document them. ​“Someone asked me if I made up these images in Photoshop or with artificial intelligence, and the answer is no. These are all taken from real life without any digital manipulations, other than occasional darkening or lightening of particular areas to make details stand out,” Martson states.

But lurking beneath that engaging, entertaining surface is a deadly serious point, about how quickly the brain finds patterns, how fast we construct a lesson, a narrative. We can create a story about something before we even know for sure what we’re looking at.

“Some people see these things all the time and others only occasionally, but we all see them,” Martson writes. ​“Most people see them as coincidence, but some people see these as messages from somewhere else. Personally, I see them as meaningful beyond coincidence, but I’m not sure how or what they mean.”

Martson’s circumspection can remain playful in the context of his exhibition because the truth of the pictures is plain: they’re not faces or body parts; they’re plants, rocks, reflective surfaces. But our brains’ tendencies to make too much sense of something turns into a darker warning as soon as you move it to other contexts. It lies, for starters, at the root of conspiracy theories, people’s unwillingness to accept coincidences as such, instead finding intent in accident. 

“Pareidolia” also drives home a destabilizing, essential point about the way we perceive the world, from the banal to the historical, from the mundane to the world-changing. It’s so much easier to have an opinion about something, or to think you know what it means, than it is to really understand what something is, or what happened. As Martson points out, just a few inches to the left or the right, and what we think we see disappears.

​“Pareidolia” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Oct. 6. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.