Beyond the View

In October 2012, Ffotogallery and bildkultur jointly presented the exhibition Helen Sear: Beyond the View at bildkultur Stuttgart. This exhibition brought together works reflecting the artist‘s exploration of the relationship between colour and form, figure and ground, the visible and the unseen.

David Drake: "The eye and its surrogate the camera lens are recurrent motifs in Helen Sear‘s work, both as a means for fine demarcation of the forms, patterns and textures of the exterior world and as a portal to the interior realm of dreams and mystery. Sear‘s work challenges the dominant view of photography as a documentary medium, questioning its indexical relationship with the world. Photography, whether in its analogue or digital form, may enable us to view up close the surface details of objects, but in doing so our perceptual experience of them becomes more ambiguous and fragmented, belying their apparent unity and coherence. Therein lies the paradoxical nature of visual perception, in particular, and our sensory experience and apprehension of the world more generally."