The Luminists

Photograph courtesy Art in General

Melanie Crean’s installation The Luminists is a minimal affair: Five audio speakers surround a large, sound-wave-shaped lounging pad. Visitors sit or lie down, enveloped by an acoustic narrative in which three legally blind artists—photographer Alice Wingwall, painter-turned-writer Tara Inmon and sculptor Carol Saylor—take turns describing their experience of sight. The piece captures the intimate details of each woman’s interior visual life. Wingwall emphasizes the body’s relation to space; Inmon discusses mental maps, and Saylor talks about the optical patterns still formed by her brain.

The aim of this installation, according to curator Sophia Hernandez, is to instigate a conversation about the “politics of vision.” While blindness is typically equated with visual impotence, Crean argues otherwise: Each of the self-possessed women she interviewed has a successful career. Unlike French artist Sophie Calle, who has used photographs to raise awareness about the visual acuity of the blind, Crean does so with sound. As each artist shares her experience, visitors are meant to transform the audio back into an image by picturing it for themselves (ideally with eyes closed). Thus, Crean encourages the sighted to place themselves in the shoes of the blind.

Crean’s exercise suggests that every person has an innate visual sense that receives aural and verbal information and transmits it as pictures. Still, however theoretically fascinating the lesson may be, one grudgingly wishes the show had more visual impact.