The Haptic Eye
Part II – Tactile Visions

curated by MARK GISBOURNE

The Haptic Eye: Part 2 “Tactile Visions” focuses on the nature of optical stimulation, which is to say how color and the sensate qualities of various materials can generate a retinal charge, and have the capacity to enervate extended sensory experiences.

Whereas The Haptic Eye: Part 1 “Eyes of the Skin” focused on materials and objects that might relate in some way to the body, “Tactile Visions” chooses to express wider sensory experiences of eye and mind, ocular capacities that are broadened through extended sensory perception, where visual experience as the effect can often lead to and provoke an intuitive sense of immanent affect. As with “Eyes of the Skin” in “Tactile Visions” the emphasis continues to stress haptic qualities such as malleable and pliable presence, but at the same time they are inflected towards ocular-feelings of touch as a sensory abstraction—experiences that might well be called an expansion of the empathetic gaze

An emphasis is placed on the variability of image and viewing subjectivity of contents, bringing together image materials and cultural sources and histories that might not otherwise commonly be brought into immediate juxtaposition. The interaction between the ethnic variables is made to increase awareness of each works’ capacities to create a different haptic sense in the viewer. The pictorial causality of effect may vary from the purely coloristic to specific details that suggest other intellectual invocations.

“…Imagination is always seen to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from the immediate images: it is especially the faculty of changing images. If there is not a changing of images, an unexpected union of images, there is no imagination, no imaginative action.”

Gaston Bachelard
Air and Dreams: An Essay on Imagination and Movement, 2002

Artists:
Zofia Butrymowicz
Natasha Yudina
Susan Hefuna
Margret Eicher
Emo de Medeiros
Jolanta Owidzka
Lizette Chirrime
Magda Skupinska
Charles Chamot