Science of Visual Perception Inspires New Orleans Artist

    NEW ORLEANS, LA, March 11, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- New Orleans artist Adrienne McFaul's exhibit of science-inspired acrylic paintings on canvas is worth a trip up Magazine Street's busy retail corridor to Cafe Luna at the intersection of Nashville Avenue. The exhibit will be on display from May 1 to 31, 2015.

McFaul is a native of New Orleans and a graduate of Rutgers Univeristy's doctoral program in psychology. McFaul specializes in applying ideas from the psychological science of visual perception to Louisiana subjects.

"One day, as I sat in a graduate seminar dealing with the work of the godfather of visual perception J.J. Gibson, it felt like I suddenly imagined a thousand images. My inspiring idea was simple: apply Gibson's concepts to Louisiana imagery."

J.J. Gibson helped the United States determine servicemen's aptitude for piloting planes during WWII. Gibson noticed that simple visual acuity metrics predicted little in terms of flying aptitude. That's when he developed the then-radical concept of affordances.

The recent blue and black versus white and gold dress controversy brought the public's attention to Gibson's legacy of research into the psychology of human vision, the very research that inspired McFaul during her time as a graduate student at Rutgers University.

"My colleagues at Rutgers spend all day everyday carefully and methodically studying the unsolved mysteries of human vision, without fanfare or the type of viral attention that the recent dress optical illusion got."

Of researchers at Rutgers such as Maggie Shiffrar, McFaul explained, "Their work inspired me to become the artist that I am today. I left graduate school with both a career as a social scientist and a renewed inspiration to also be a painter."

Oak trees, Mardi Gras scenes, mermaids and Greek muses hover amid fragmented, unreal backgrounds in McFaul's work.

"We see objects in terms of what we can do with those objects. Affordances were basically a missing link that we needed in order to understand how we see what we see."

Affordances are a concept developed by J.J.Gibson which help us understand the complex chain of events that connects objects in the visual plane to our experience of sight.

"When I compose a 2-dimensional image on canvas, I approach the affordances of a paintings' imagery as secondary to the affordances of the canvas itself. I consistently apply this idea in my work: the canvas itself is my primary object of interest, what the content can do for you is of secondary importance, replicating the experience of seeing a real object depicted within the canvas is tertiary."

McFaul's work is held in many private collections throughout Louisiana and has been displayed at the Alexandria Museum of Art in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Cafe Luna is proud to premier the newest body of work by Adrienne McFaul. Cafe Luna is located at 802 Nashville Avenue in Uptown New Orleans and is open from 7 a.m. to midnight seven days a week. Previews of this exhibit are now available at adriennemcfaul.com.

Exhibit address:
Cafe Luna
802 Nashville Avenue
New Orleans, Louisiana 70115

# # #