About the artist
I paint abstract landscapes as a way to expand my own mind in directions that both contrast from and complement the work I do as an experimental psychologist. For the past forty-five years I have studied the inner landscape of the human mind through experimentation, learning firsthand the challenge of understanding and representing the invisible through a series of careful inferences. Unlike the inner world of the mind, the visible landscapes of the outer world ought to be more easily graspable. Or so I had assumed. But as I’ve discovered, the land also petitions us to make careful inferences – inferences that must be extracted from data that are visual, historical, and social. My current efforts are guided by a desire to see the lands I encounter as they are being transformed by us. In this moment, how could it be anything else.
Mahzarin Banaji