what you see when you close your eyes too hard
Electrical Light
Note from Amie Cunat, Senior Seminar Professor
December 2024
In late October, the seniors were prompted to offer suggestions for titles toward the Senior Highlights exhibition, which would open at the end of the semester. The voting took place on the same day that a guest lecturer, Mark Gibson arrived early for his talk and gave me a hand tallying the seniors’ votes:
what you see when you close your eyes too hard
My initial thoughts when we landed on this title was its connection to looking and seeing –two distinct metrics of perception that, combined with physical proclivities, cultural experience and tactile knowledge, inform how we navigate and understand visual art and design. WHAT DO we see when we close our eyes too hard?
The internet tells me that pressure on our eyeballs causes electrical signals that our brain deduces as flecks, sparks, halos. Other interpretations of this physiological phenomena, include descriptions of patterns, colors, forms, or fireworks...but I don’t buy into these
responses (or feel disgruntled by the possibility my eyes can’t see them). My hunch is that pressure causes simple reactions, and ostensibly, it's these experiences’ lasting effects that conduct complex reads.
When we all met back for class a few days after the results of the presidential election, the meaning of the title shifted into a position of defiance, of defense, of resiliency for me. WHY DO we close our eyes? To protect them, to refresh them, to block something out, to rest them. The imaginative resonance that the title offered in October now has another ring to it. If “looking” implies a passive act (our eyes taking in all visual stimuli), and “seeing” is tied to
absorption (recognition and perception), then what happens when we close our eyes? We look at sparks of electrical light, but we see abstractions of ourselves.
What I see when I keep my eyes open, are fifteen participants of a generation that mobilize tovenact change and offer space for marginalized voices whether in the classroom, studio, gallery, or in the physical/digital world. More than that, they have experienced some of the most tumultuous upheavals in their formative years but continue to make art: a tactile act that is –at its heart—radical I can remember several of them in my classes as 18-year-olds whe.n we
were still behind masks and practicing social distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am astounded by their steadfast commitment to learning.
The Senior Seminar group has balanced a multitude of diverse responsibility on top of being full-time, likely double-majoring art students in New York City. Moreover, they have fostered a completely new peer dynamic within the Fordham Visual Arts Complex’s recently opened studio space: one that is rooted in community, presence, friendship and continuity –all this while discovering form for personal expression. Each artist is opinionated, intelligent, funny,
motivated, curious, and dedicated to becoming a practitioner in a creative field.