In every person there is a blind spot. The point at which the optic nerve meets the retina produces a scotoma, or blind spot. The brain compensates by filling this void with the expected.

English Kills Art Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo show with artists Tescia Seufferlein and Andrew Ohanesian. This walk-in, interactive installation forces you to desert your expectations of the familiar when confronted with a variant reality. Drywall, lumber, and fabric conspire to form a trap that exposes the viewer’s beliefs as comfortable fiction. This show subverts expectations of space and comfort.

Blind Spot focuses on a singular catastrophic event, one in which lives are irreparably altered, and examines this moment at the corner of change where seeing forward and backward in time is possible.

The viewer is confronted to take themselves out of a green zone of comfortable separation from such things as 80 dead in a car bombing in Iraq, 176 in Brazil, 300,000 in South Asia. When confronted with the impact of that devastation on a personal basis, being forced to quantify all the noise of 24hr news at once, the curtain is lifted on the blind spot of modern society. This show reflects the faceless suffering of others and how close to that precipice we ride on a daily basis in our own lives.

This is the California artists’ second show together and their first on the East Coast. Before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006, Andrew Ohanesian worked extensively on construction-based installation, focusing on the feeling imparted to a place by its occupants. His work has appeared in shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Worth Ryder Art Gallery in Berkeley, CA.

Tescia Seufferlein graduated from UC Berkeley in 2005 with a degree in Art Practice and Theatre. She combines these two disciplines into her practice of costume art. She uses fabric and imagery to capture single moments, portraying lives through their garments. Tescia has shown her work at Worth Ryder Art Gallery in Berkeley, CA, Riverside Gallery in Tahoe, CA and China Room in New York City.