SIGHT UNSEEN: International Photography by Blind Artists

SIGHT UNSEEN: International Photography by Blind Artists
March 3 – April 9, 2011
Opening reception: Thursday, March 3
Members and special guests 6-8pm
Public reception: 7-9pm

Live music by Eric Woods (guitar, mandolin, banjo) with Jeff Hooton (bass) from 6:30-8pm
Blind Photography Workshop
with Cinthea Fiss, MSCD Visiting Assistant Professor
Wednesday, March 23, 6pm
$20 ($15 MSCD students and CVA members)
Space is limited. Registration required.
DARK LIGHT: The Art of Blind Photographers
HBO Documentary
To be screened every First and Third Fridays during the exhibition at 4 and 6pm.
Sight Unseen, the first major exhibition of work by the world?s most accomplished blind photographers. The exhibition explores the idea that blind photographers can see in ways that sighted people cannot.

Many of us, with sight leading as our dominant sense, use images to build our world. Visual information is practical to our survival and yet it has become pervasive in our world. We respond to visual overload by shuttering and narrowing our perception, a form of self inflicted blindness, so as to rebalance our senses. But for the sight-impaired artists in this exhibition, making a photograph has provided new ways of
seeing.

These artists employ diverse strategies in their work. Some use the camera to
present their own inner visions. Some capture the outside world unfiltered with
a non-retinal photography of chance. And a number of the artists, legally blind
but retaining a limited, highly attenuated sight, photograph to capture the
outside world and bring it into their realm.

In his novel Blindness, José Saramago writes, "Perhaps only in a world of the
blind will things be what they truly are." Beethoven composed music without
the ability to hear, blind Milton and Homer conjured the landscapes of the
heavens and the underworld, and the artists of Sight Unseen further explore
our definitions of blindness and challenge us to reevaluate what it means to
see.

Artists:
Ralph Baker, New York, NY; Evgen Bavcar, Paris, France; Henry
Butler, New Orleans, LA; Pete Eckert, Sacramento, CA; Bruce Hall, Irvine, CA;
Annie Hesse, Paris, France; Rosita McKenzie, Edinburgh, Scotland; Gerardo
Nigenda, Oaxaca, México; Michael Richard, Los Angeles, CA; Seeing With
Photography Collective, New York, NY; Kurt Weston, Huntington Beach, CA;
Alice Wingwall, Berkeley, CA. Curated by Douglas McCulloh.

The CVA will be open until 8pm every First and Third Friday during the exhibition.
Exhibition Sponsor: Interstate Kitchen and Bar