Once something enters our awareness, it can seem to appear everywhere. Known as a frequency illusion or the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, this perceptual bias describes our tendency to recognise recurring details with increasing regularity, as though the world were revealing a pattern previously concealed. In Frequency Illusion, David Micheaud considers the relationship between attention, coincidence and the human impulse to construct meaning from seemingly unrelated encounters.
Revisiting his photographic archive following his previous exhibition, Unhomely, Micheaud identifies a recurring motif spanning twenty-three years: the sphere. From discarded plastic balls and domestic light fixtures to tethered balloons, buoys and architectural forms, these incidental observations had quietly punctuated his life. Reassembled through a new series of works in pastel, they begin to suggest an alternative autobiography, one shaped less by chronology than by the persistence of a single form.
Both elementary and universal, the sphere collapses distinctions between the mundane and the cosmic.