Perception and Visual Cues

Our eyes view the world as flat. Perspective, foreshortening and parallax allow our brains to assemble a three-dimensional representation of the world based upon two simultaneous flat images. Painters use perspective and foreshorten­ing to convey three-dimensional space. Sculptors rely upon the viewers’ perception to interpret the object. Most objects we view have a coherent continuous set of flat images when viewed from subtly varied angles. A cow looks like a cow in profile, head on, from above, and at every angle in between. The Magic Angle Sculptures surprise us by playing with our expectations about how we view the world.