NARRATOR:  

Robert Riley, former Curator of Media Arts at the Museum: 

ROBERT RILEY:  

James Coleman is an Irish artist who’s been working in the slide projection medium since 1958. By both making the images and writing the text, Coleman brings his viewer through an extraordinary adventure, from sequence to sequence, about perception and about the way, in a sense, our own mind plays tricks on us. 

NARRATOR:  

In this piece, Coleman has created fourteen different sequences of slides. The voice-over narration that accompanies the slides is an integral part of the work. It serves as a counterpoint, a point of reference, and a decoding device, all at the same time. As one image dissolves onto the next, the changes are almost imperceptible. But these slight alterations are extremely important to understanding and resolving the mystery that each of these sequences presents. Again, Robert Riley.  

RILEY:  

As your mind changes in your appreciation of each one of these images, so too the images change, and as subtly as the mind may change in its orientation to the image. 

NARRATOR:  

Charon was the boatman in Greek mythology who carried souls across the river Styx to the underworld. For Coleman, the boatman is a metaphor for the mechanism by which we comprehend, order and define experience. 

RILEY:  

The imagination itself is a conveyance between worlds understood and worlds that exist beyond your perception of them.