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Over three decades, postmodernism and postcolonialism have made a convincing case: the act of looking is no simple, innocent matter. What you see is not what you get. For imbricated in the act of looking are an infinite number of gross and subtle transactions, so that what we see is the result of a complex although often instantaneous negotiation of cultural codes and social power, a largely unconscious negotiation mediated by neuro-psychological processes. During the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, many artists engaged in rigorous investigation of the power stakes within looking and seeing, excavating the repressed relations of exploitation in the male, Western gaze. This work coincided with important theoretical critiques of the primacy of vision in Western culture by such scholars as Martin Jay and Jonathan Crary, critiques that prompted some practitioners to enhance the engagement of the other senses to evade vision's rational control. However, fewer artists explored the key relationship between vision and the physical and psychical process of perception, although certain feminist artists worked with the metaphor of the blind spot to represent the predicament of women in art. Rather, the link between vision and perception has appeared to be less the concern of 'the artist as ethnographer than the province of proto-conceptual optic experimenters such as Marcel Duchamp, and the op artists of the 1960s and early 1970s.
It is this key relationship that informs the recent photographic installations of Sydney based artist Virginia Ross. Ross has practiced as a photographer, educator and arts writer since the early 1990s, but in 1998 began studying psychology. She became fascinated by the overlap between her pre-existing concerns as a visual artist and the role and understanding... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline