May 25, 2011

Positive Signs #23 & 24

by Christine Wong Yap

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

The human body, by his mere presence, imposes a schema on space. Human time is based in favor of the future.... Humantime, like the human body, is asymmetrical: one's back is to the past, one's face to the future. Living is a perpetual stepping forward into light and abandoning what is behind one's back. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place, 1977. 35-36

Christine Wong Yap, Positive Sign #23 (The Human Body), 2011; glitter and neon pen on gridded vellum; 8.5 × 11 in./21.5 × 28 cm

Conscious/Unconsciou, health/life/illness/death, more/less, good/bad, happy/sad, virtue/depravity, rational/emotional. Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms of one or more spatial metaphors. We typically conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical--that is, we conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated. Lakoff/Johnson, Metaphors we live by. 1980. 17, 59.

Christine Wong Yap, Positive Sign #24 (Conceptual Metaphors), 2011; glitter and neon pen on gridded vellum; 8.5 × 11 in./21.5 × 28 cm

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
Next Wednesday: Positive Signs #25, 26, & 27 on experiential perspectives.
See all Positive Signs to date.

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