Teetering on the edge of self-seduction and sincerity, ‘My Imaginary Friend… Was a Feeling’ offers up an observation of self, autobiographical narratives and ‘feelings’. Mel Dixon’s practice merges the edges of the human emotional experience and the literacy of the art object. With ‘My Imaginary Friend… Was a Feeling’, Mel investigates contemporary society’s persistent culture of the reduction of feelings. The long duration work ‘Digital Bruise’ is placed in a site-specific installation generating a self-reflective experience in the viewer, while questioning the viewer’s idea of self.
“Feelings are not mere decoration added on to the emotions, something one might keep or discard. Feelings can be and often are revelations of the state of life within the entire organism – lifting the veil in the literal sense of the term. Life being a high wire act, most feelings are expression of the struggle for balance, ideas of the exquisite adjustments and corrections without which, one mistake too many, the whole act collapses. If anything in our existence can be revelatory of our simultaneous smallness and greatness, feelings are.”
– Antonio Damasio