“HUDSON, NY, UNITED STATES, June 22, 2023, Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, presents Sight Unseen, a cinematic installation by Artist James Autery comprised of two films Agnosia and Bridge playing simultaneously. The exhibition opens July 8th, 2023 from 4 to 7 PM and runs through July 23rd.
The dark gallery setting will provide benches in the middle of the room while the two films play simultaneously on opposite walls. One silent film is in black and white while the other film is in distorted color with dialogue.
Agnosia is shot as a first-person account through the eyes of a blind woman, whose eye surgery in 1909 removes her cataracts, and brings her newfound sight. The result is a crisis of visual information which her brain, for the most part, cannot process. The film is wildly imaginative and beautiful in how it is shot, expressing the vulnerability found within the unknown.
At the same time, on the opposite wall plays Autery’s film Bridge. Shot with a drone, the camera travels under a long bridge until it eventually records its path again, this time in reverse. It is difficult to look away from this footage as it evokes the feeling of weightlessness, and generously inserts itself as the soothing antidote, to the heavy life juncture expressed within Agnosia.
The culmination of these two films in Sight Unseen is both disorienting and transportive.“
–Christopher Freeman, Gallery Director of Private Public |
