View & Visions: Connecting & Sharing the Visual

By Kate Nearpass Ogden, Professor of Art History, Visual Arts Program, Stockton University (USA)

The 2022 IVLA Virtual Art Exhibition “Views and Visions: Connecting and Sharing the Visual” features work by seventeen artists from countries as diverse as Canada, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Pakistan, Peru, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States. The thirty-one works of art in the exhibition lean heavily toward digital photography, although there are also hand-crafted prints and drawings, photo-constructions, a video, and stills from virtual reality projects.

The title “Views and Visions”(1)is meant to distinguish works of art that are views of real places and things from art that depicts visions imagined by the artist. The title seems particularly appropriate for this year’s online exhibition. “Views” immediately connect us to the visual reality we share with others; “visions” allow artists to share their personal dreams, ideas, and interpretations of the world around them.

Both views and visions can be powerful and expressive modes of art-making. This year’s online exhibition includes works of art from both camps, as well as images that straddle the line between them. The interpretations given here are the writer’s; to read the artists’ own words, please see the information in the online exhibition.

Some of the most straightforward views in the exhibition – seemingly unmanipulated photographic windows onto the world – are Eric Zeigler’s images of interior spaces and landscapes, and Faizan Adil’s views of mosques and city streets in Lahore, Pakistan. Zeigler’s color image of a control room full of computers and monitors and Adil’s black and white photograph of the Badshahi Mosque make an intriguing pair: both images are shown frontally and are roughly symmetrical, but the first is a high-tech, modern interior (a gravitational wave detection lab) while the latter is a romantic 17th century edifice.

Photographs can operate simultaneously as both views and visions. N. Toros Mutlu’s black and white photographs appear to be straightforward, unmanipulated images of the world around us, yet their inky, velvety darkness turns rocks, leaves, and clouds into something more magical. Zsolt Bátori’s photographs combine architecture and nature, often in straightforward ways, although one dark, slightly blurred image from the series The Orchard and the City contains more than a hint of mystery.

Susan Jane Britsch’s photograph “Her Demesne” is both view and vision. Britsch uses a double exposure in an otherwise straightforward photograph. She has literally layered an interior world (a kitchen sink) with an outdoor scene (branches silhouetted against the sky). This color photograph is from a series inspired by her great aunt’s handwritten cookbook from the early 20th century; in the series she layers past and present, family relationships and personal identity.

Another crossover between the two modes is found in Marita Ibañez Sandoval’s work. Sandoval uses photographs of real buildings pieced together into miraculous fictional structures; some appear to float in the air while others rest on flat surfaces. Her architectural sources are buildings found in the Japanese prefecture Ibaraki, where many Brazilian immigrants live.

Barbara Miner’s lush, colorful prints lean more toward visions than views. Based on leaves, seedpods, and other natural forms, they seem inspired by nature, but the artist’s color combinations and geometric patterns push them into the realm of abstract visions. Miner’s prints are made with hand-carved stamps on matte photographic paper.

Dan Hernandez’s artwork, made with inkjet transfer and acrylic paint, is likewise more vision than view. “Grotta” resembles an old-fashioned video game. Instead of the Mario Brothers, however, this imaginary underground world has been populated by religious idols, merfolk, and other mythical creatures. In other images, the artist takes inspiration from medieval manuscripts, the art of other countries, and Hieronymus Bosch.

Gary McLeod’s images involve a form of layering. His “Omachi” is a still from a virtual reality project. It looks like a view of a real place with an overlay of the same scene photographed at a different point in time. Like Britsch, McLeod is interested in past and present, depicting views as they looked in 2011 and again in 2021. A second virtual reality project in the exhibition is Thomas Wilcox’s “Bendtwist III,” which is more vision than view. Wilcox seems to have created a strange new world: an empty desert landscape populated by twisting parabolic shapes.

Debra A. Davis uses another type of layering to create artistic visions: her images of water, clouds, and sky have an overlay of open geometric lines and shapes. Titled “Environmental Convergence – Water,” her work suggests a futuristic world, perhaps a water-covered planet elsewhere in the universe.

Patricia Search likewise creates imaginary worlds, molding colors and shapes into visions that explore, in her words, “the interplay between color, space, and time.” Like other works in the exhibition, Search’s images – including “Lyrical Reflections” – “juxtapose realism and fantasy, logic and emotion….”

Several artists in the show combine text with images, an artistic option available since the invention of collage in the early 20th century that gained traction with the conceptual art of the 1970s. The addition of text works against purely realistic image-making. The artists Viviana Torres-Mestey and Lisa Winstanley combine text with images to create surrealistic visions.

Torres-Mestey is represented by a photomontage, “I am Nadja,” which references the title of a book by André Bretón, founder of the Surrealist movement. Winstanley’s digital collage “Birdcage / Gramophone Feather / Listen Hand” explores our “innate human ability to find connections from seemingly unconnected themes.”

The artists Hyungjoo A. Kim and Tracey Bowen also mix text and images. Kim creates clean, sometimes minimalistic graphic designs, often in the service of environmental and humanitarian messages. Her design “We Breathe and Live, Together” seems to depict a single branch with round leaves. On closer inspection we see tiny plants, animals, humans, and a single ball of the Covid-19 virus that adds new meaning to the image. Bowen’s drawings combine handwriting and abstract imagery in a way that suggests scientific experiments, and the artist confirms this relationship by explaining that she uses drawing as a way to think through issues and problems in the world that puzzle her.

This year’s online exhibition includes a video by Misaki Kawahata titled “Even with our eyes open/closed.” Video, like film, cannot help but seem realistic, given its innate ability to replicate the world around us. When broken and intercut with changing images, however, video becomes a more abstract medium. Kawahata’s video has closeups of a clock and an eye, split-screen images, and solid blocks of red, black, and blue. As the artist explains, it is about “two paradoxical visual experiences. … With our eyes open,” she says, “we cannot see anything in the dark. … With our eyes closed, we see the color of our own blood by light.” Despite the reality of its individual images, the video represents an artist’s exploration and interpretation of the act of seeing. In a sense, it is both view and vision.

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(1)Kate Nearpass Ogden, Views & Visions: Recent American Landscape Photography (NY: International Center of Photography, exhibition brochure, 1985). And Edward J. Nygren, Views and Visions: American Landscape Before 1830 (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986).

SELECTED ARTISTS

Faizan Adil
Zsolt Batori
Tracey Bowen
Susan Jane Britsch
Debra A. Davis
Dan Hernandez
Misaki Kawahata
Hyungjoo A. Kim
Gary McLeod
Barbara Miner
N. Toros Mutlu
Marita Ibañez Sandoval
Patricia Search
Viviana Torres-Mestey
Thomas Wilcox
Lisa Winstanley
Eric Zeigler

Awards and honors to be announced.

This online exhibition is presented by the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) in conjunction with its 54th annual conference: Connecting & Sharing – Envisioning the Futures of Visual Literacy (Aug 10-12). The conference is hosted by the Department of Language and Communication Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with the MultiLEAP (Multiliteracies for social participation and learning across the life span) profiling area of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

*Originally this exhibitions was hosted on the Kunstmatrix website. We have since created our own page to host the Views & Visions: Connecting & Sharing The Visual Art Exhibition.

*Updated September, 2023.