The Haptic Eye is conceived as a series of online exhibitions of soft sculpture, objects, and variable materials that focus upon visual assimilations in the context of a multisensory and expanded field of artistic production. In the current post-quarantine context of social distancing and physical separation, it seems imperative to focus anew on those sensory experiences that have been diminished in the immediate pandemic situation. While the exhibition is online and optically directed, attempts have been made to generate, what Gaston Bachelard referred to “polyphony of the senses,” to acknowledge that visual aesthetic experiences come from the fact that the eye collaborates with the body and the other senses in a state of continuous interaction.
The Haptic Eye exhibitions take on a particular orientation shaped by visual sensory experiences, subtlety shifting the emphasis encompassed by the metaphor of haptic vision. Hence they will focus on immediate sensory qualities that are common to the various works presented. Each presentation will shift the emphasis around ideas of malleability, soft materials configured, or uniquely manipulated into given shapes without the effects of rupture breaking or cracking. Also pliability, the use of materials that are flexible, easily bent, elastic, and often open to a variable presentation. The works may be foldable, stackable, or accumulative in presentation, have transportability, and they are easily conveyed from location to installation.
THE HAPTIC EYE PART 1: “The Eyes of the Skin”
The first exhibition puts the emphasis on touch and the body, soft sculpture works, or objects that have a sense of palpable tactility. Unlike soft sculpture in the expanded field as determined by late modernism in the seventies and eighties, in this instance the focus is placed on the phenomenal qualities of the works, evoking body-based ideas of the pelt, mantle, habitat, and in consequence, the increased capacities of sensory awareness are brought about by the innovative materials used by the artist.
Artists:
Shaarbek Amankul
Birgit Dieker
Sheila Hicks
Ritzi & Peter Jacobi
Marie Claire Messouma Manlanbien
Aiko Tezuka
Günter Weseler
Magda (Vitalyos) Ziman
