The Sighted See the Surface
Dorit Cypis
This work is dedicated to the late Michael Asher who serves as a catalyst for Dorit Cypis’ ongoing research project The Sighted See the Surface. Asher’s critique of institutions shaping what is made visible and not visible to the public has inspired Cypis to work with the Braille Institute in Los Angeles as a site for study and collaboration. Since June 2013, Cypis has been volunteering at the Braille Institute’s Telephone Reader Project, reading weekly the daily newspaper for sight challenged people.
Cypis’ work with the non-sighted has deepened her investigation into esthetics, ethics and engagement – the root of her art practice since the late 1970’s. The Sighted See the Surface presents an in depth inquiry into comprehending the complexities between sight and seeing, otherness and difference and the relationships between the interior and exterior self. Since the inception of this project in 2012, Cypis has produced sets of text-based work, photographs, drawings and writings.
DORIT CYPIS, TO SEE
LM Projects is pleased to be part of this project by collaborating with Cypis to produce a set of three text prints as stone press lithographs. For this set, titled To See, a phrase is typeset as a run-on sentence with every other word shifting in ink hue and tone. Each of the three prints are distinct; two alternating black inks printed on black paper, another as white inks on white paper and the third, also white on white, but printed as nearly invisible.
Above: Dorit Cypis, To See, 2013
30″ x 22,” Hanemuhle Rag paper, Stone Press Lithograph,
(Left) Edition of 2, + 1 AP, (Right) Edition of 1 + 1 AP
Cypis deliberately imposes a difficult task for the viewer by creating a nearly illegible text-based work. She makes a simple yet complex concept difficult to read testing one’s ability to see and to recognize what is there to be seen. The capacity she is speaking of has as much to do with perceptions of identity as with a phenomenology of knowing, a human capacity always full of threat and of potential.
Above: Dorit Cypis, To See, 2013
30″ x 22,” Hanemuhle Rag paper, Stone Press Lithograph,
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
The Sighted See the Surface is an ongoing research project by Dorit Cypis begun in 2012. Additional programming will follow in the coming months.
Launched in 2009, LM Projects serves as an invitational for emerging, mid-career and established artists to create exhibitions, and projects as multiples. www.lmprojects.net / 323.652.0580/ art@lmprojects.net. Open by appointment.
