“Well, actually, I’m a psychic being, and you know, we don’t concern ourselves with being born; we concern ourselves with being eternal; we deal with the spirit.” — Sun Ra

LOS ANGELES—The Eye Sees Not Itself calls forth discourse on spiritualization of the materialistic and rationalistic world. In a hope to rediscover time and space for renewal, transcendence, and being eternal, the exhibition investigates how immateriality, mythology and fantasy fit in our postmodern world.

Artists all have to deal with physical materials, technology, bodies, empirical knowledge, socio-political events, and consumer society. How does the burden of materiality affect the artist’s own mind and psyche? What do artists do to transcend limitations of the material world and neutralize fear that is induced by violence, chaos, injustice and dark forces? In contemporary artistic practice, eclipsed by the Western canons where the intellectual sensibility is pervasively bent to favor rationalization, irony, appropriation, and materialism, is it possible to reserve a space for a greater sense of belonging and for emotional connections to each other and with nature?

The Eye Sees Not Itself arrives from conflicting encounters with the Eurocentric academy, burgeoning metropolitan cultures and spaces, and indigenous histories as forms and concepts, systems and processes, to approach the metaphysical context of artistic practice and production.

THE EYE SEES NOT ITSELF