The World Inside
Lance Blomgren
DianNe Bos, Lea Bucknell, Bob Jickling, Ernie Kroeger, Donald Lawrence,
Holly Ward & Kevin Schmidt AKA Desire Machine, Mike Yuhasz, Andrew Wright
A
s a counterpoint to the site-specific installations in the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura
Festival, the ODD Gallery presents The World Inside, a group exhibition that investigates the
intertwined subjects of landscape and viewership, perceptual mediation and the urgencies
of our material condition. The World Inside illuminates the ways in which our visual technologies,
including the eye itself, have worked to define and undermine our impressions of the real, our sense of
self and community. The images and objects in this exhibition draw connections between what we see,
how we see, and the enduring cultural effects of our empires of sight.
In this exhibition, the lens – the convergence point where rays of light intersect, where the world
outside casts its inverted doppelganger into the darkened, retinal spaces of our minds – becomes
both a literal focal point and exploratory metaphor. Through these porous apertures, the objective
world passes into our highly subjective selves; our most deeply-held visual certainties flicker against
our decidedly experiential, and impressionable, psychologies. Acts of translation, imagination,
perceptual distortion, narcissistic bias, and psychological fantasy projection quickly threaten easy
ideas of reality, often overwhelming collective understanding. For The World Inside, external reality can
be better viewed as a quixotic, if startlingly potent, shared fiction. This exhibition posits a revision of
vision itself. It proposes that our senses of sight, and our faculties of apperception, can perhaps reveal
more about our place in the world than the world we actually perceive.
As the works in the exhibition suggest, the “world inside” is one indelibly influenced by the history of
optics, the enduring social imprint of the camera obscura itself. For the artists, the camera’s unique
role in shaping cultural knowledge and individual psychology becomes a point of inspiration, critique
and celebration.
For Bob Jickling, Desire Machine (Holly Ward and Kevin Schmidt), and Mike Yuhasz, this influence
takes on a political dimension. In their works, the camera’s authoritative legacy – its ability to cast a
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