Chris Doyle, Cynthia Lin, Jenny Dubnau, Mike Bayne, Molly Springfield, Paolo Arao, David Clarkson

ISE Cultural Foundation is pleased to present a group exhibition, “observant”, curated by Vicki Sher.

The artists participating in observant turn masterful technique toward a new source material: the digitalized image. They all possess brilliant technical skills and a steadfast belief that reproducing the seen world faithfully will provide insights into that world. It is an act of faith for an artist to reproduce a photograph. Here, looking is done with devotion, done methodically, or even a version of religious seriousness, but the result approaches something very opposite to religion. The artists are “observant” and “extremist” in their meticulousness but, despite the religious fervor that those words possibly bring to mind, they offer a decidedly undogmatic course: fidelity to visual fact, specifically, digitalized visual facts.

The power of an attentive hand is ages old, but here has a peculiar contemporariness. These images not only represent our world as it looks today, but also reflect our current technological tools for image-gathering and our specific ways of combining old and new. How we see has changed as much as what we see, so even the basic art tools (pencil, oil paint) have new jobs to do to reestablish their validity.