John Oehm: Waking Up

Former faculty and artist John Oehm was recently part of a gallery exhibit at Harvester Arts, curated by Trish Higgins. John generously shared a few moments as the crowds gathered to delve deeper into the processes of art, the people portrayed, and the ideas that shape our perception. 

Many people make portraits, but Oehm seems to have mastered what his former college professor encouraged him as a student, to capture a “speaking likeness” in his subjects. These magical moments when a person is beginning to express themselves are free of awkward poses or saying “cheese”. Capturing these glimpses reveals layer upon layer of the character, style and essence of the individual themselves; -- what’s on the inside as much as the surface. 

In life, we get used to (and learn to ignore) things that are consistent, which is called 'sensory adaptation’. Where or how we direct our attention determines a lot of what we perceive and therefore experience individually. Songs, for example, are all made up of individual notes, yet people generally experience them as a mix of the whole as they form rhythm, melody and harmony. In psychology, this is an example of the idea of Gestalt, a holistic combination of what people respond to as their perception. 

There are also bottom-up and top-down processes and cultural influences that determine where and how humans seem to do this.  

“Bottom-up processing refers to sensory information from a stimulus in the environment driving a process, and top-down processing refers to knowledge and expectancy driving a process,” according to Egeth and Yantis. 

In 1963, Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell and Melville Herskovits revealed how culture can even make people from Western cultures prone to certain visual illusions like the ‘Muller-Lyer illusion’ that non-Westerners are not. Language and cultural nuances all alter perceptions of reality, their role in situations, how to behave, what to wear and every other detail imaginable.  

Considering that BCC and Butler County is home to students and residents from hundreds of different countries, religious affiliations, which includes over 45,000 Christian denominations, as well as dozens of other religious and secular world views mixed with those holistic individual influences, it can be easy to see that none of us are seeing the same thing when we look at life or a painting in it. 

“I want to wake us up from the illusion that it’s real,” Oehm said. 

The “technically perfect” that those cultural and perceptual habits imagine may not be the most appealing or satisfying, so Oehm uses surface gestures to create an image with more dimensions than photography equipment or the photo-realism that he has achieved in many other portraits and landscapes there on display.  

Being focused on much of this collection during the Covid pandemic lock-down, there seemed to be a deep collective familiarity with Oehm’s backyard views, deeply personal moments with loved ones and the desire to know what is real and what is illusion. 

Considering all that combines to give us a vision of reality, it seems wise to pause deeply like Oehm and consider waking up from what we may be ignoring, taking for granted or habitually experiencing. There is support discovering more and awakening from unhealthy patterns of perception with mindfulness, EMDR, psychedelic-assisted therapy, as well as many other practices available right here in this multicultural Midwest American community.