The rorschach test is a projective test where subjects’ are presented with visual images made up of randomly splattered, but symmetrical inkblots on paper. Psychologists would observe and analyze the subjects’ perceptions of these images in detail to determine their nature or condition, or rather their personality traits and emotional functioning. Presumably, the subject’s response to the presented ambiguous stimuli would reveal hidden emotions and internal conflicts which they projected onto the test.

          Projective tests have their origins in psychoanalytic psychology, which argues that humans have conscious as well as unconscious attitudes and motivations that are beyond or hidden from conscious awareness. In other words, what they see in the images is heavily due to their past or current experiences whether they’re aware of that of not.

 

         Through this series I want to illustrate the same subconscious construction active in humans while providing some context for it to exist in; the streets of Toronto. By creating rorschach tests but implementing recognizable figures and scenes within them, the ambiguity of the classic test is taken away and this awareness of fabricated, individual perception is translated to viewers in how it might function in everyday life. What you see in the images, what you see in the test and how you view the series as a whole is meant to emulate the internal process that occurs during a rorschach test. Simultaneously, it is meant adress and mirror the same internal process that occurs during your walk to work. What you look at, how you perceive it, and the thoughts that come along after are all a product of the attitudes and motivations that are beyond or hidden from conscious awareness. The photos display reality in an abstract yet concrete form to then reflect the abstract yet concrete nature of our perception. Cognitively determined, but open to interpretation.