X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility
October 7 – 30, 2021
Blue Sky is pleased to announce the 2019 Critical Mass Solo Exhibition, X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility by Noelle Mason.
X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility is a body of work about the phenomenological effects of vision technologies on the perception of undocumented immigrants. The images used in this series were collected from the Border Patrol and border-watching vigilante websites. This project remediates images made by machine vision technologies that are used to patrol international borders into the 19th century processes of cyanotype and wet-plate collodion, as well as hand woven tapestries and embroideries.
This translation highlights how subtle shifts in medium can evoke a new emotional relationship to this imagery and questions the manner in which the surveillance medium itself serves to de-humanize the subjects of machine images. This shift in medium also reveals how new vision technologies recycle Cartesian modes of viewing land and body and in so doing reinforce a neocolonial worldview.
The remediation in X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility serves to physicalize the machine vision imagery currently being used to patrol international borders. This use of craft and 19th century alternative processes calls into question the immediacy in which these images are produced and consumed, rending them from the screen and giving them body and space to be considered outside of their original context.
Noelle Mason (American, b. 1977) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is about the subtle seductiveness of power facilitated by systems of visual and institutional control. Noelle has shown nationally and internationally in a variety of non-traditional spaces, galleries, and institutions including the National Museum of Mexican Art, Orlando Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, Jerome fellowship, Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant, the Florida Prize for Contemporary Art and the Southern Prize. In 2004 Noelle was a resident at the Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture. She holds a BA in both theatre and fine arts from the University of California, Irvine and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Noelle currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Art at the University of South Florida and is the Founding Director and Curator of Parallelogram Gallery in Tampa, FL.
