WAYS OF SEEING brings together works of art created by the faculty and staff of Biola’s Art Department. As artists invested in both the making and teaching of visual material, we each regularly grapple with the nature of what it means to see, to look, to observe, as acts of meaning-making.
In 1972, art critic John Berger produced a series of documentaries for the BBC, also titled Ways of Seeing. Additionally released as a series of seven essays (three comprised entirely of images), Berger’s work introduced a broad audience to the complexities involved in the act of viewing art - the conversation created between the original perceptual act of the artist meeting the gaze of the viewer, both informed by the contexts (internal and external, objective and subjective, temporal, spatial, and so many more) carried by maker and viewer.
Berger writes, “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
The works in this show were selected as representations of this unsettled nature of seeing. WIthin the exhibition you will find visions shaped through the idiosyncratic perspectives of their makers. Some works are deeply observational, reflecting the external world back to us through the artists’ own perceptions as translated into photographs and representational paintings. Other works reflect internal states, hidden essences, and invisible realities, driven by imagination and reflection into the spaces beyond our sight. Still other works call our attention to the nature of the world surrounding us, both physical and social, causing us to examine or question our perceptions and assumptions.
In pondering this diversity of visual experience, Berger’s essay continues, “Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye's retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice…Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.”
While Berger here dismisses the “question of mechanically reacting to stimuli” as outside his scope of inquiry, contemporary advances in technology have allowed the physiological nature of seeing to take on new forms of access and immediacy for artists. The inspiration for our exhibition came in part through a research collaboration formed across disciplines, including Art, Psychology, and the History of Text Technologies. Our gallery show will also serve as a working lab for new research into how art education impacts ways of seeing, through the use of Pupil Labs Neon eye tracking glasses, which examine eye movement patterns and visual attention. The gallery’s gridded exhibition design acts as a physical model for the spatial data-mapping generated through the research, which seeks to deepen our understanding of the ways our bodies and minds create the act of seeing art.
Please join us in this exploration of the complexities of seeing, and stay connected with the Art Department for information about related programming coming in February.
Opening Reception: January 16, 6-8 PM
Exhibition on View: January 16-February 16, 2024
Artists; Luke Aleckson, Sang Young Bang, Melissa Beck, Laura Goble Brand, Kevin Browning, Dan Callis, Laura Carey, Daniel Chang, Kari Dunham, Aaron Holmes ,Christian Perez-Morin, Jonathan Puls, Thel Rountree, Christine Lee Smith, Astri Swendsrud
Eye-Tracking Researchers; Luke Aleckson, MFA (Biola University), Jason Brunt, PhD (Biola University), Aaron Rodriguez, PhD Candidate (Florida State University)
Curators; Dan Callis, Astri Swendsrud
The Green Art Gallery regularly exhibits high-caliber work from professional artists who are invited to engage the campus community in cultural dialog through original curated exhibitions centered around various contemporary themes.
Refer to the gallery map to find a parking lot or structure, and locate the Green Art Gallery, Bardwell Project Space and Library Art Exhibitions sites. For an interactive campus map, visit biola.edu/campus-map.