Se(e)a in Touching

To look, this work proposes, is already to touch. The eye moving across an image is not so far from a fingertip drawn along a surface, reading its grain. Se(e)a In Touching takes that quiet proposition as its ground and turns to the sea, the smoothest of subjects, precisely in order to draw a roughness out of it.

The screen refuses to behave as a single, clear window. Within the widescreen frame, images of different sizes and angles are cut and set side by side, each holding the water in its own way. Moving pictures that carry perspective are pulled, little by little, toward flatness and stillness. A wave rolls forward and then settles into pattern, as flat as wallpaper, before rising again into texture. The viewer's gaze loses its footing between depth and surface, and it is exactly this slippage that summons touch.

The sound is not laid over the image from outside. A program written by the artist reads the data of the image itself and translates it into sound, so that values of brightness and color become the raw material of hearing. The grain of a sea touched by the eye is, one might say, touched again by the ear. Vision spills into the field of the auditory, and the borders between the senses reveal how porous they always were.

Whether the memory of touching the sea only with one's eyes has seeped into these frames is not something to state with certainty. Yet the effort to touch what cannot be touched sits plainly alongside the way this screen keeps raising its texture. Se(e)a In Touching gently unsettles the habits of viewing. It asks the audience not only to see an image but to touch it and to hear it. The screen ceases to be transparent glass onto a distant scene and becomes a kind of skin, met at once by fingertip and ear. On that skin the sea remains something seen, touched, and heard in the same breath.