At The Beginning of Seeing
Curators:
Oliva Hiester & Liam Murphy-Torres
On View:
Nov 1st – Nov 26th
Opening Reception:
Friday, Nov 1st, 5pm – 8pm
ABOUT THE CURATORS:
Olivia Hiester is a painter and printmaker born and raised in West Philadelphia. She will graduate with a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2025, where she is a recipient of the Magiure Artistic Excellence Scholarship, the Samuel David
Memorial Prize, the Color Woodcut Purchase Prize, the Thouron Prize, the Louis B. Sloan Prize, and the Eleanor S. Gray Prize. Olivia has twice attended the Mount Gretna School of Art’s summer intensive program and was awarded the Lois and Charles X. Carlson Landscape Painting Residency. She holds a Barnes-DeMazia Certificate from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, PA.
Liam Murphy-Torres is a Philadelphia based draftsman, painter, teacher, and independent curator. He is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he received the Packard Drawing Prize, The Irma H. Cook Prize, The August Cook Prize, and the Daniel Garber Prize for Excellence in Drawing. He holds a Barnes-DeMazia Certificate in Art History and Aesthetics, and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York and the Mount Gretna School of Art.
Excerpted from the catalog essay:
“…in the words of Philip Guston, ‘we are always at the beginning of seeing.’ To rely on formulas, systematic rationalizations of the visual world, is not seeing. Knowing is not seeing. to truly see the world is to see the unexpected. Perception is not fixed in a rational way. It is deeply irrational, surprising, and illogical. Out of the corner of our eye we see a towering giant, but when we focus all our attention on him we find that the man in question is only slightly above an average height. A flash of bright red, on closer examination, is a much more subtle hue than we first imagined. Car mirrors come with warnings: Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.
For this reason, a truly observed painting reveals the nature of the observer, not just the thing observed. Tto make a perceptual painting is to paint not just a motif, but the deeply personal act of perceiving it. This show is an attempt to reconcile six painters who have made real strides towards truly seeing as if for the first time, to see not what they expected to find but that which is surprising, strange, and true.”