[accessibleimage] Blind photographer's vision extends beyond her eyes

Hi,
Article about exhibit  at Berkeley Art Museum and lilnk to
museum about. Books listed at that sight.
Regards,
Lisa

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/18/EBG90B98SE1.DTL
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/blind/index.html

books listed at sight
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/blind/index.html
Title: Blindness: The History of Mental Image in Western
Thought (paperback)
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/blind/index.html
Title: Memoirs of the Blind, the Self-portrait and Other
Ruins (paperback)
Author: Jacques Derrida, Publisher: University of Chicago

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/blind/index.html
Title: Shooting Blind: Photographs by the Visually Impaired
(hardcover)
Author: Edward Hoagland, Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux


Berkeley: Blind photographer's vision extends beyond her
eyes

Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, February 18, 2005

Blindness hasn't removed Berkeley photographer and sculptor
Alice Wingwall's vision.
Pictures keep coming into her head. Only the way she
composes and frames them has
changed. She's busy with her camera, and her world is full
of color. 

One of the life-affirming finds Wingwall made after the
ordeal of gradually losing her sight
to a retinal disease was that light is one thing, vision
another. True vision takes place in
the brain, not in the eyes. 

Wingwall's brain works fine and therefore she thinks and
creates visually, as before. She
not only continues to make visual art but also is entering a
new phase as an artist. She's as
much in charge of her creativity as she was when she could
see. She just needs her guide
dog, her auto-focus camera and human helpers to keep her
spatially lined up on the goal
her inner eye points toward. 

"Most people think it's not possible, but the rest of us are
out here slogging away," said Wingwall, whose ability to
perceive light all but vanished about four years ago from
retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary disease she has had since
she
was a young woman. "Most people say, 'How do you do that?'
But what they're really saying is, 'You can't do that.' " 

Examples of Wingwall's work as an artist going blind are
appearing at new exhibitions at the UC Berkeley Art Museum
and the Townsend Center Gallery on the UC Berkeley campus.
The museum show, "Blind at the Museum," explores the
visual worlds of photographers Wingwall and John Dugdale,
sculptor Robert Morris and multimedia artists Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha and Joseph Grigely. Opening Feb. 17, a companion
show at the Townsend focuses on Wingwall's
photography. 

"We wanted to explore vision and explore what it means to
actually see, and all the different modalities of seeing,"
said
Katherine Sherwood, a UC Berkeley art professor who is
co-curating the museum show with Beth Dungan, a
postdoctoral student at the university's Center for
Medicine, Humanities and Law. 

The two events come at a time when the traditional meanings
of vision and blindness are giving way, and along with
them the barriers visually impaired artists have faced to
getting defined by their work instead of by their
disability.
Behind the shift are revolutionary ideas about how the brain
forms images. 

It seems a healthy brain is capable of representing line,
color and perspective from a variety of sources, not merely
from
eyesight. This means that a sightless person can see and
that a sightless person with artistic ability can give a
powerful,
organized representation of reality in a way that an artist
with intact eyesight normally wouldn't. And because the
optic
eye fixes on objects and on the boundaries between things,
some say the inner eye sees wider. 

"Because we live in a visually dominant world, people think
that when you go blind your cognitive world goes, too.
That's not true," said Christine Leahey of Santa Monica,
founder of The View from Here, an organization that supports
blind and visually impaired artists. (The organization's Web
site, www.zoot.net/theviewfromhere/, has articles and
images.) 

The idea that blindness isn't the opposite of vision is
something philosophers proposed decades ago. Brain research
has
affirmed it in the past 10 years, and in the past year or
two the work of blind artists has begun breaking into
mainstream
venues. 

"For these artists to be shown simply because they're
artists, that's the novelty," Leahey said. "That's a cause
of social
justice. The way I see it, that's an extension of the civil
rights movement." 

Wingwall, who is married to architect and UC Berkeley
architecture professor Donlyn Lyndon and has three children
and
three grandchildren, has advantages that many blind artists
lack. She had been a respected conceptual artist long before
her eyesight failed. Her disability developed slowly,
enabling her to adjust. Perhaps most important, her visual
memory is
rich from a lifetime of working and traveling. 

She can't make out edges now unless the light is very
bright, but memory keeps her encounters with sculpture and
architecture alive in her mind and available to guide new
work, such as "Cordelia's Granite Waterway," a four- pooled
water sculpture she created in 2002 for a residence in
Austin, Texas. She can't see colors, but memory lets her
experience
her favorite -- magenta -- as intensely as when her eyes
could translate to her brain the frequency known as red. 

In some ways color is more vital to Wingwall as a blind
woman. Along with humor and industry, it's a critical part
of how
she keeps her spirit and identity strong in spite of the
trauma of her disability. She expresses her attitude every
day by
wearing bright clothes. 

"I have this one idea, which is 'see or be seen,' '' she
said. "If I can't see, I'm going to make myself feel better
and
everybody else look at these wonderful colors -- mostly red,
orange, electric blue, magenta, fuchsia." 

Along with fully lit memories, Wingwall combines elements
gathered by touch and sound as her vision faded and finally
went dark. The most important of these deal with the
relationships she has had with her two guide dogs, the
Labrador
retriever, Slater, and his predecessor, Joseph. All four
images on display at the museum concern Wingwall and her
dogs. 

"Hand Over Dog: Joseph at the Temple of Dendur," is a photo
Wingwall made 11 years ago, when her vision was going
but she could still make out shapes. She had long admired
the ancient Egyptian temple installed in a museum in New
York. She took Joseph to see it and used her camera to
explore the bond she and the dog were developing. 

The picture shows Wingwall's hand held out in front of the
camera and pointing toward the temple, with Joseph sitting
in
the foreground. "I'm pointing to a building that I love and
that I want him to know about," she said. 

She went on to develop the theme using blowups of the dog
superimposed on other admired buildings. Joseph floats
down through the clouds over Mission San Rafael and fills
the sky over Chambourd in France. "It's like now he's
entered
my life and he's a gigantic presence," Wingwall said. 

The adjustments in perspective that Wingwall has made since
going blind also apply to how she frames images. She has
a newfound freedom about where the edges of a picture should
go. The clear-cut centering that a person with eyesight
takes for granted isn't available to someone who can't see. 

"The edge just starts going," Wingwall said. "I don't really
start with the frame. Lately I've been trying to work with
things, trying to bunch up against the frame." 

A photographer fully tuned to light and architectural
history might see her task as to capture the full unity of a
building
such as San Trovaso, a historic church in Venice. But to
make her "Self-Portrait at San Trovaso," Wingwall
photographed the front of the church and composed a mosaic
of architectural parts and parts of herself. Curved
decorative stone pieces became hair curls around her face, a
round window became her torso, an engraved stone from
ancient Rome her pelvis and a column one of her legs, paired
with an image of one of her real legs. 

Wingwall's passion for architecture is reflected in her
name. Inspired by a street shrine on a Roman building with a
stone
cherub who seemed to be pulling the building forward despite
having lost one of her wings, she changed her name to
Wingwall in 1980. She was born Alice Atkinson in
Indianapolis and grew up in rural Indiana. 

Wingwall co-directed a short autobiographical film, "Miss
BlindSight/The Wingwall Auditions.'' Since going blind she
has become more interested in movement and hopes to make
more films. 

"You can have bad days," she said. "You can sit there and
cry. Then you think there's always something I want to do.
Better get up and load the film." 

In addition to photography, Wingwall is working on a project
with a rugmaker in Sonoma County, Hansine Pedersen
Goran. They're designing a rug based on one of her drawings,
showing the artist's hand holding a coin with a Roman
temple engraved on it. She is working on a second design
that will be dominated by dark red and will include a
written
message. 

"What I'm going to have on that one are Braille dots for
three words: lumière, magenta and aileron," she said.
"Lumière is
French for light -- we're wishing for light, wishing I could
have more light, more physiological vision. Magenta is just
a
color I adore and wear a lot. Aileron has to do with wings
and flying." 

Learn more 

-- "Blind at the Museum," an exhibition of the work of Alice
Wingwall and other blind or visually impaired artists, UC
Berkeley Art Museum, through July 24. $8, $5 for seniors and
students ages 12-18. (510) 642-0808.
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. 

-- A free public conference on visual impairment and art is
set for 4-7 p.m. March 11-12, in the Museum Theater, with a
public reception for the artist 6-7 p.m. March 11. 

-- A companion show highlighting Wingwall's work runs
Feb.17-April 4 at the Townsend Center Gallery, 220 Stephens
Hall on the UC campus. A conversation between Wingwall and
John Terry, dean of fine arts at the Rhode Island School
of Design, with a screening of Wingwall's film "Miss
BlindSight/The Wingwall Auditions," takes place at the
gallery 4 to
6 p.m. March 3. Free. (510) 643-9470.
townsendcenter.berkeley.edu. 



BLIND AT THE MUSEUM
WED JAN 26 2005 - SUN JUL 24 2005

An art museum would seem to be no place for the blind. Yet
art objects can address all of the senses?sight, touch,
hearing, scent, taste?and thus offer an opportunity to
reconsider the process of "viewing" or responding to art.
Visual artists often think about the very nature of vision:
What does it mean to "see"? How does an artwork address the
viewer? What are the behaviors of looking? And what are the
limits, or the liabilities, of the gaze? 

Blind at the Museum, in the museum's Theater Gallery,
investigates the nature of blindness and the ?visual arts?
through the work of many artists, among them Sophie Calle,
the French conceptual artist well known for her series on
blindness; the sculptor Robert Morris; multimedia artists
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Joseph Grigely, and photographers
John Dugdale and Alice Wingwall. Rather than thinking about
blindness and sight as polar opposites, these artists
encourage us to explore the wide range of optical
experiences?peripheral vision, distortion, floaters?along a
continuum. Included are artists who emphasize sound, touch,
and multisensory expression; artists who investigate the
unreliability of vision; artists who are blind and yet are
committed to the visual arts; and artists who rethink the
activities of viewing within the museum. Some offer a
meditation on the limits of the optical; others explore the
metaphors and stereotypes of blindness; and a few highlight
the embodied experience of visual impairment. 

John Dugdale, for example, depicts optical aids?ranging from
eyeglasses to camera lenses?that are part of his
photographic process, and indeed, part of his visual
experience. The distortions, reflections, and visual effects
that result from these interventions are not only captured
in his cyanotypes, but are suggested through the handmade,
old-fashioned glass he uses to frame each piece. A highly
successful fashion and commercial photographer before losing
his sight to CMV (Cytomegalovirus retinitis), Dugdale turned
to the origins of photography in order to pursue a fine art
career. His nineteenth-century procedures and still life
photographs engage in a dialogue with William Henry Fox
Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography. 

Alice Wingwall also depicts the lived experience of
blindness, using panoramic cameras and other technologies to
give a sense of "warp" to her work. Having come from a
background in sculpture and architecture, as well as
photography, Wingwall, in her series of photographs of her
guide dog Joseph, invites the viewer to experience her
renegotiation of beloved architectural sites. Her
photographs of Joseph at the Temple of Dendur at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, highlight the ways
in which her vision and viewpoint are redirected by her
guide dog and her experiences of blindness. 

At the same time as this show provides a reframing of
blindness and what it means to view a work of art, it
proposes a rethinking of access, disability, and the museum.
The very notion of the blind visual artist can alter our
expectations of the museum and the role of the viewer.
Prompted by disability rights legislation, museums around
the world have undertaken to make their exhibitions more
accessible, but this access tends to relegate blind patrons
to ?special? programming and collections. Often, concerns
about access address the physical environment and
design?large font size, ramps?rather than diversifying
perceptual and intellectual access to artwork. If
technologies of vision (such as lenses) change our
experiences; if peripheral vision, blind spots, or floaters
influence our notions of looking, how might alternative
perspectives and technologies invite us to adopt new
behaviors and approaches? As part of a larger movement of
institutional critique, Blind at the Museum prompts us to
reconsider the practice of looking within the museum, and to
imagine new ways of seeing and knowing for all viewers. 

Katherine Sherwood, Professor, Art Practice, UC Berkeley 
Beth Dungan, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for
Medicine, the Humanities, and Law, UC Berkeley 
Guest Curators 

Braille labels and large-print text of accompanying material
will be available. 

A related audio tour is available. Reservations are
required; please call (510) 643-4151. 

The Theater Gallery is open daily; admission is free.  


Funding for Blind at the Museum is generously provided by
University of California Humanities Research Institute; the
Flora Family Foundation; and, at UC Berkeley: Arts and
Humanities; Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities;
Consortium for the Arts; Center for Medicine, the
Humanities, and Law; Departments of English and Art
Practice; and Disability Studies. 
 
 
  BAM/PFA (510) 642-0808   bampfa@xxxxxxxxxxxx   © uc
regents 2005 


Title: Blindness: The History of Mental Image in Western
Thought (paperback)
Author: Moshe Barasch, Publisher: Routledge (Taylor &
Francis)
Price: $ 29.95
Number in Stock: 3 
Description: Blindness is a remarkable study of how Western
culture has imagined what it is like to be blind, especially
as it is represented in that most visual of arts, painting.
Art historian Moshe Barasch here draws upon not only the
span of art history from antiquity to the eighteenth century
but also the classical and biblical traditions that underpin
so much of artistic representation: Blind Homer, the healing
of the blind, blind musicians, blindness as a punishment,
blindness as a special mark. The book discusses blindness in
antiquity, in the Early Christian world, in the Middle Ages,
and in the Renaissance, with a final long consideration of
Diderot. Blindness explores the fascinating paradoxes in the
Western representation of blindness, revealing the ways in
which the idea of absence of vision has been central in the
history of our visual culture. Published in 2001. 288 pages.
20 halftone images.

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