PREVIEW : Friday 18th June 6pm/8pm

LOCATION : 3, The Strand, Longton, Stoke on Trent, ST3 2JF http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=3%2C+The+Strand%2C+Stoke-on-Trent%2C+United+Kingdom

PARKING : 3 hours FREE car park at Tesco (park at the very bottom of it and just cross the road).

End of residency opening times : Saturday 19/06, Tuesday 22/06, Thursday 24/06, Friday 25/06, 11am-2pm.

BLOG : http://longhousearcelinesianidjiakoua.blogspot.com/

“Eyes, windows to the soul”, self-initiated and self-founded one month Art residency in an empty shop in Longton, following an Action Research Bursary (Longhouse, West Bromwich). Works poetically drawing metaphors between a shop and an eye and exploring some mechanisms of vision .

“There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place – when the spark is lit between sensing and sensible (…)”

MERLEAU-PONTY Maurice, “Eye and Mind” in The Primary of Perception, Northwestern University Press, 1964

“One common fallacy is to assume there is an image inside your eyeball, the optical image, exciting photoreceptors on your retina and then that image is transmitted faithfully along a cable called the optic nerve and displayed on a screen called the visual cortex. Now this is obviously a logical fallacy because if you have a screen and an image displayed on a screen in the brain, then you need another little chap in there watching that image, and there is no little chap in your head. And if you think about it, that wouldn’t solve the problem either because then you’d need another little guy in his head looking at the image in his brain and so on and so forth, and you get an endless regress of eyes and images and little people without really solving the problem of perception. So the first thing you have to do to understand perception is to get rid of the idea of images in the brain and think instead of transforms or symbolic representations of objects and events in the external world.”

Synapses and the Self – Lecture by V.S. Ramachandran – BBC 4 – 2003