Description

The Cincinnati based non-profit arts organization and gallery, Manifest, invites visual artists and designers to submit original works about, depicting, or exploring eyes and their relationship to sight and vision, perception, observation, and intuition. Open to any and all traditional and non-traditional 2D and 3D visual arts media.

Aside from actual touch, eye contact is one of the most intimate gestures we can make. Eye contact signifies attention, seeing and being seen. Such interaction (and aversion to it) can also take on a variety of meanings in different contexts: respect, fear, affection, power. A shared gaze is communication and recognition. It allows us, forces us, to acknowledge the humanity in the other.

If we remove the human eye from the context of seeing, what does it mean on its own? An organic and fragile lens, a lightning-responsive aperture, a sensitive organ conveying information regarding color, distance, shape, and most importantly light to our brains and thereby to our minds. This eye, the eye as object and organ, can be assisted, repaired, fooled, and broken. It can even be stolen.

$40 for up to FOUR entries submitted. $5 per each additional entry.

Includes exhibitor honorarium of $50 for each exhibiting artist, and new Grand Jury Award of $1,000 for one jury-selected work from among the exhibits on view.