FREE ENTRY / All Street Gallery - "Seeng What Isn't There" Open Call

Art can manipulate imagination, materializing what’s unseen and conjuring images that exist in the mind’s eye. Art can haunt people, making them question their perceptions and sanity. In the presence of shadows, ghosts, magic, sleight of hand, or run of the mill trickery, the viewer seeks answers and understanding. This visual ambiguity asks the viewer to look deeper and notice what may not be immediately apparent. In this process of examination and reflection, stories and connections are often found that were never there to begin with. Art can become a form of alchemy, using a physical or tangible product to influence the metaphysical.  

Traditionally, in visual art, the eye is given preferential treatment as the beholder of images. Yet through physical manipulation, different senses can be engaged, triggering both optical and multisensory illusions. Based on Leon Battista Alberti’s Renaissance theory of visual perspective, literary critic and poet William Empson devised seven types of ambiguity: (1) shadowy amorphousness; (2) unexpected unification of signs and symbols; (3) metaphor and substitution; (4) optical illusions that trick the viewer’s senses into completing an image; (5) simultaneous presence of recognizable signs or symbols that are visually interchangeable or oscillate with one another; (6) individual images that when overlaid produce new linkages; and (7) disjunctive or uncanny representations removing objects/people from their expected contexts (Empson, 1966). Artists can lean into such representational anomalies and experiment with how far they can push the bounds of imagination and our perceptual limits to produce unsettling, haunting, and confounding imagery.

During the month of February, All Street Gallery will be hosting an exhibition at our East Village location (77 East Third Street) entitled seeing what isn’t there. We are conducting an open call for art of all mediums that speak to themes of ambiguity, illusion, shadows, ghostly figures, and haunting images. We especially encourage artists with a distinct interest in capturing transitional phases –  such as day to night, life to death, or visible to invisible – to apply.