Installation: Krista Dragomer + Punto Ottico Human Eyes

The artworks I created for Punto Ottico Human Eyes are an exploration of the question: what does it mean to see with human eyes? The senses are portals through which we take in, feel, and interpret the world in and around us. We each have our own unique sensing bodies that we have learned to inhabit through our individual experiences and cultural contexts. As we sense, we perceive. Perception is a creative act that connects us to the world and to each other through both difference and consensus.

The window pieces hanging in the Madison Avenue and Court Street stores reflect on the concept and experience of a frame. How have we, individually and collectively, learned to frame our experience of vision? What is a foreground and a background? How do we determine the boundary between one kind of shape and another? Could these perceptual experiences be different if we learned to use our human eyes differently? The imagery comes from a photo of myself taking off my glasses. The light that opens up between the figure and the frames becomes the only defined shape. The three elements: the face, light, and frames each play a role in the viewer’s perception of shape and form, shifting slightly as light moves over and through the translucent paper and moves our eyes with it.

These works were created at Pace Prints paper studio. They are made from abaca, a semi translucent paper fiber, which has been colored by a hand papermaking process called pulp painting. The imagery is created through the use of stencils and pigments while the fiber is wet, before it has been pressed into a paper sheet. The colors were inspired by the colors of the Jacques Durand frames in the fall/winter 2022-2023 Punto Ottico Human Eyes NYC collections.

For the shelving display pieces, I reflected on the twoness of human vision. Binocular. Bifocal. Vision’s twoness gives us depth, and this depth does not only refer to having two eyes. Vision is also the meeting place of outer and inner light: the light of the sun meets the light of the mind. I designed a two part sculptural piece to reflect these two components of vision. Created in pairs, one part of each pair is inspired by close-up images of the human eye and the other by images of stars from the James Webb telescope (both images that can only be viewed through a specific kind of lens). Similar to a progressive lens, these works incorporate near and distance viewing. The intermediate distance occurs in the color reflections visible between the two parts.with one side inspired by close-up images of the human eye and the other side inspired by recent images of stars from the James Webb telescope.

photos by Rose Photography and Doni Dusan Lucas

The colors correspond to the adjacent frames lining the shelves and the two part design of the sculptural form is a reference to the way that frames shape the space(face) surrounding them. The shelving pieces were created by sculpting a prototype which was 3D scanned and printed at iMakr Studios in a semi-translucent plastic. I then painted and layered the surface of each individual piece with paper pulp, repeating the papermaking and pigmenting process used in the window pieces.