I am always the most drawn toward art pieces where the eye portrays a very visceral, complex, and deeply human emotion that one cannot easily define or express in any other medium. Paintings such as The Fallen Angel (1847, Cabanel) and Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885, Repin) are some among many examples of pieces that clearly portray this through the eyes of the subject. The artist’s ability to represent this feeling on the canvas and infect the viewer to feel the same is, to me, the very power and purpose of art. I see the art making process, therefore, less about evoking beauty or pleasure, and more about its ability to connect other humans through a shared feeling or experience. 

In an age where artificial intelligence can create “art” and where the definition of the word itself is consistently developing and adapting to society’s new technological advances, I wanted this series to act as a love letter to the many different mediums of art throughout humanity’s history. In each of  the photos, I reference different art works such as the False Mirror (1929, Magritte), Comedian (2019, Cattelan), The Creation of Adam (1511, Michalangelo), The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833, Delaroche), Un chien andalou (1929, Buñuel) and art mediums such as painting, photography, poetry, dance, sculpture, and digital art. 

I chose to represent these mediums through the shape of an eye as it is, arguably, one of the most significant and clear indicators of emotion in the human body and, because of our inability to properly define it, one can say that art is in the eye of the beholder.