Walk With Eyes Closed: An Exhibition about Reconnecting with Senses in the City

Description

When Shon walks a city, a unique practice of hers, she explores it through an imagined character, a phantom – ‘Stillman’. A sense of otherness emerges as she walks with it, which stimulates her imagination beyond the sole reliance on vision, expanding it into bodily consciousness.

Through the physical quest of walking, she observes with an open heart and mind, and sometimes closed eyes. An accelerated exchange between the reality and the perceptions of Shon’s walks produces the integral elements of her rich and powerful graphic works – the lines, shapes, and colours that are woven into her code and system of a city and that are translated into both the familiar and the alien. This reformed interaction with the world enlarges the conception of space and the space of conception. ‘Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms”, we learn to “abide” within ourselves’. Here, Gaston Bachelard points out the importance of psychological spatial existence. Particularly in a contemporary era that is filled with urban cacophony and tech profusion, citizens connect more with themselves by creating mental space away from reality, walking with eyes closed, and mind-wandering into reverie, repose, or their own city of imagination. Igniting their inner curiosity, finding peacefulness, and staying mindful probably does not require a six-week meditation retreat. Instead, Shon believes that people might just take a little walk.

The exhibition features an artist talk on 5 August 2019. Please e-mail to programs@duddells.co to register.