Art You Can Only See When Your Vision Is Bad

When I was a kid, sometimes I'd take my glasses off and a pile of laundry would look like a witch. But there was this alphabet poster on my wall that (*without glasses) looked like a cowboy. So I would look at it and imagine he was keeping me safe.

I never forgot that cowboy.

Now I'm making art that works the same way. The plan is to have a show in a gallery where you walk in and take a vision exam like this:

If you have good vision then the smaller letters are unreadable. But here's what it looks like with  blurry vision (specifically uncorrected refractive error, if you have an astigmatism it might not work so well sorry):

If you "fail" the eye test, we hand you a pair of glasses that will blur your vision enough so you can appreciate the art too.

Here's a poem. To read it, take your glasses off and go back and forth until you start to see gaps between the words; then go more slowly until you see the letters. If you have a camera 📷 you can set your lens to manual focus and deliberately defocus it until the poem appears.

I'm also working on a bit more artistic drawings that should have a more robust effect that works even for folks with astigmatisms or other types of lens error:

Still a work in progress - so stay tuned for updates!