Is blindness, in its broadest sense, the rule or the exception? This March, Gallery 110 presents Hysterical Blindness: Paintings and Mixed Media Collage by Ingrid Sojit. Although the diagnostic label is no longer in use, the term hysterical blindness once referred to a condition in which patients suffer visual impairment in the absence of any known medical cause.

 

These paintings and collages explore the relationship between eyesight, the physical ability for the eye to see, and vision, the ability of the brain to process what it sees. The term vision has several literal and metaphorical meanings—from a person’s ideological foundation, to their imagined plans for the future, to imagination itself, or even to a supernatural apparition.

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“The idea that vision loss can be a psychological phenomenon touches upon a set of questions that are interesting,” says Sojit. “What do we see when we have lost our ability to recognize what we are seeing? Are dream images, apparitions, and hallucinations an alternative way of seeing?” Human vision is also about our preconceived ideas of the world, our ability to detect patterns, and our need to organize reality in a way that is consistent with our worldview while highlighting irregularities that signal threats to our safety.

 

Sojit’s works exist between what we see and what we believe about what we are seeing, suggesting that vision itself is never exclusively literal or metaphorical. Pathological lack of vision, hysterical blindness, can be viewed as an inextricable feature of the human condition.