Second Hand Perceptions (2025)

Collages of diaries and sketchbooks kept over the last 7 years. 36 pages, letter size. Published by AC World.

Second Hand Perceptions is a line lifted from Susan Sontag's Radical Styles of Will in her text Aesthetics of Silence. 

"Practiced in a world furnished with second-hand perceptions ... confounded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity is cursed with mediacy. Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization -- the transcendence -- he desires. (sic) 

Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be overthrown."

Sontag is referring to the foggy noise of material. The folly of language and image, for all of the messy ways that we can read, misread and dissect our own different interpretations. Our current age of image making gives an added potency to this curse of mediacy.  

I've thought about this quote again and again. I started to imagine my own apartment, furnished with all of my own second hand perceptions. The handling of these metaphorical objects and what they might feel like to sit in. Sontag was talking about the aesthetics of silence, but I am interested in this frenzy of volume. 

These 30 something pages of image and text are the results of years of journaling. Notebooks kept from 2017-2018 while I was still living in Halifax are cut up and rearranged into this new context alongside writing from 2023, when I was living in one of the worst apartment buildings in all of Strathcona. Most handwritten texts are from journals kept during March, 2025, from the comfort of my very nice apartment complex in Edmonton.

The picture is never whole. Sitting in this space of inklings, there are the traces of a life lived and all the lies in between.

Andrew Thorne, April 11th 2025

This publication is currently available through AC World, or directly through the artist by contacting andrewthorneartist@gmail.com