Reading, Again

Presented in conjunction with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2018–19 research theme Reading Faces, Reading Minds, this exhibition seeks to complicate how we think about perception. Works in a diversity of media confront the viewer with perceptual and conceptual disorientation. Some works highlight the way vision is imbued by memory and/or anticipation. Others illuminate the way in which legibility is muddled when something is uncoupled from an original framework or context. There are also works that focus on permeable and delicate structures of looking, such as lenses, filters and screens. When perceptual fibrillations cause cognition to stall, there is an opportunity to explore looking and the conundrum of sight. With this in mind, the exhibition asks visitors to look, yes, look again, and longer this time.