"In my art and life, I really strive to reverse the old adage that what you see is what you get. If I can be Coyote and practice my sneak-up, I can engage the viewers from a distance with one image and lure them in for exposure to another layer, which changes the initial view into quite a different reality. After all, that is what ethnic culture is all about - or even an ongoing relationship. What you see on the surface is never the same again one you begin to plumb the depths."

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Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, said good old Berkeley; but, according to most philosophers, he was wrong. Yet, obviously, there are things for which the adage holds. Perception, trivially, to begin with. If elements of conscious awareness--pains, tickles, feelings of heat and cold, sensory qualia of colors, sounds, and the like--have any existence, it must consist in their being perceived by a subject.... This shows, of course, that such experiences are epiphenomenal, at least with respect to the physical world.

— Zeno Vendler