“When we finally blinked and opened our eyes, suddenly it appeared to be a completely different world. Even though all the same objects were there, we saw them anew, like in a dream, where you still call your best friend by the correct name even though he looked entirely like a stranger. Despite constantly blinking in an attempt to refresh what we see, as if to wake up, we actually keep jumping from island to island, landing on a new world each time.”
The initial idea for Eyelids are Islands came from two works by visual artist Giuseppe Penone entitled Palpebra sinistra and Palpebra destra (left and right eyelid). His works were part of an Arte Povera exhibit in the Kröller-Müller Museum during my visit to The Netherlands in February 2013. These works, shown as a diptych, covered an entire sidewall of the gallery, but its physical scale was marked by utmost simplicity, consisting only of tessellations of a beautiful black charcoal pattern on drawing paper. Upon closer inspection, I learned that the patterns were all impressions of the skin on Penone’s own eyelids. Thus in my piece, the types of dialogue occurring within the ensemble are informed by the dichotomies within our own bodies, the left and right sides, the internal and external.
EYELIDS ARE ISLANDS
Tonia Ko
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