A Willful Act of Pareidolia

Ashley Anderson in the ACAC Shop

Photo by Terry Kearns

Here,  Atlanta artist Ashley Anderson talks with ACAC Artistic Director Stuart Horodner about the process behind his ACAC mug design:

Stuart: I wanted you to contribute a design for our first ACAC mug because I am a big fan of your graphic works -- whether you are drawing on Coca-Cola cups (as seen in our Day Job: Georgia exhibition), making video game-inspired prints using Marilyn Monroe’s face in various ways (seen at Emily Amy Gallery), or producing B&W zines. 

I thought you’d appreciate the chance to do something that could work well on a ceramic mug, but also a lively image/text connected to the art center. How did you approach this opportunity? 

Ashley: Much of the time when I draw I engage in a willful act of "pareidolia", better known as the part of cognition that allows us to see images in clouds or wood grain. One of my favorite things to do is go have lunch or tea somewhere and then stare at the floor or tabletop and wait for my brain to generate random images. Much of the time I’ll receive a fragment and then riff on it until I have a complete image, however disparate its parts, such as a pug-faced rattlesnake made of sausages wearing a fried egg for a hat.

In the case of the cup design for ACAC, I browsed through my sketches and was particularly struck with the Hand Thing drawing that eventually became the chosen design. Originally it had been a slightly abstracted, design-y hand making the OK gesture with a diamond inside the thumb/forefinger circle, but as I fooled with the image over and over, the three outer fingers conformed to a spiral terminating in an eye, which had replaced the diamond. 

The language portion was a word game I played with myself, beginning with the terms “You see?/Yo sé!” “Yo sé” is Spanish for “I know”, which is somewhat correspondent to the question “You see?” since seeing and knowing are still fairly intertwined. The “Okay!/O que?” combination was inspired by the hand gesture and round out the conversation(s) with another play on phonetics, inverting the inflections of the first pair of words. The result is a miniature discussion/monologue that could take place in any art space, its ultimate conclusion rather open ended:

I know!

You see?

Okay!

Or what?