LEGALLY BLINDISH: PAINTINGS + TRANSLATIONS
The exhibition Legally Blindish and it’s programming continues into 2025.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The Social Security Administration (SSA) of the United States defines legally blind as “best corrected visual acuity of 20/200 or less in the better-seeing eye or a visual field limitation of 20 degrees or less.”
In the US, vision care is considered separate from healthcare –neither is guaranteed.
The SSA’s definition of legal blindness implies a kind of absolute accessibility to corrective measures and screenings that barely exist in our human-decentered systems. The National Library of Medicine published A Comprehensive Review of State Vision Screening Mandates for Schoolchildren in the United States in 2021, outlining standardization and conclusiveness of vision exams that might happen only once in a child’s public school journey. Only 41 states require distance vision screenings for schoolchildren, the results of which are often inconclusive or require further examination—putting an impossible burden of guesswork on children, teachers, and parents to monitor vision changes in and out of the school setting.
Within this system, Briget Heidmous, the artist, experienced early and severe vision decline that went undetected. This led to being held back in school, unnecessary disciplinary actions, and social disconnection. This problem was compounded by being blonde and a girl—two things associated with dumbness and submission in the 1990s. This inspires the exhibition title: Legally Blindish.
The human-decentered system, the expectations, and the disconnection—all continue to impact Briget’s relationship with vision, experience, imagination, and memory. As a young person, the world beyond her hands was a mystery of blurred lines, sprays of light, and devolving forms. Her imaginary worlds took place between the clarity of the micro and the amorphous macro. And they still do.
With these paintings, Briget explores location, space, and place, inviting us into the illusory scale of worlds in multiple stages of construction and deconstruction. The artist's relationship with discovery, multi-sensory experiences, and energetic imprinting drive the works. She says, “The paintings alone might invite us to project, translate experience, and wonder about our creation.”
In conjunction with the paintings, Briget presents her project, Translations. In an iterative and collaborative manner, she works with sound-artists to interpret the visual information of her paintings into a sound-based translation. Altogether, visual language is converted to the language of sound through a process that parallels the work of literary translators.
Magnus Andretti and Bruce Copening, the sound artists in this exhibition, are paid for their work and are co-creators of their translation with shared copywriting status.
Briget's background in contemporary art curation and programming for the academic gallery space inspires Translations. She marries viewer experience theory with an interest in high-value and artist-made museum experiences that might be exciting to all while prioritizing the experiences of those with sensory impairment, such as vision and hearing impairment, blindness, and deafness.
With this exhibition, she invites us to wonder:
What might happen when we suspend attachment to what is to explore what could be?
In what ways might non-disciplinary projects impact the offerings of institutions?
How might non-linear thinking, or creative thinking, be harnessed to disrupt systems that decenter human needs?
THE ARTIST
Briget Heidmous
Briget Heidmous [1989] is an artist, creative entrepreneur, freelance brand manager, strategist, curator, and educator in Washington, DC. With a BA in Studio Art from Hastings College, she has participated in visiting artist programs at Tyler School of Art and Burren College of Art, Ireland. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and through ad-hoc performances in Washington DC, Ireland, Philadelphia, France, and throughout her home-state, Colorado. She is the Brand Manager and Strategist at Femme Fatale DC and co-founder of ARTARIANICA, a visual poetry collaboration. As assistant curator for experimental programs at Colorado College (January 2013- November 2017), she administered programming and budgets, working closely with organizations, academics, and artists, including Senga Nengudi, Raven Chacon, Basim Magdy, Ruben Aguirre, Ryan Banagale, and MASS Design Group. As a creative entrepreneur, Heidmous organizes experience-centric activations that leverage the power of collaboration between creatives and entrepreneurs to transform space to place.
Heidmous is known for developing concept-driven proposals to achieve high-level collaborative outcomes. www.briget-heidmous.com
Briget Heidmous Artists Statement
As a zero-waste, non-disciplinary artist, my work manifests in hybrid forms involving performance, installation, drawing, painting, and street art. I interrogate and connect Theoretical Physics, Neuroscience, and Psychology through creative praxis. To uncover the convergence of these categorically separate subjects, I generate art objects and experiences that reveal their interconnectivity. In what ways do categorically separate disciplines converge? What are the impacts of human energy? How can we conduct profitable experimentation in dynamic, non-disciplinary spaces? In what ways are all things mutable? In response to such mega-quandaries, I work to describe and disrupt systems and patterns on the singular, personal, level and on the collective, communal, level. I make physical and visual the acts, examinations, and outcomes of patterning by creating objects and moments that explore the tensions of desire, frustration, and change.
THE GALLERY
Culture House Gallery is a non-profit art gallery offering rotating exhibitions for emerging artists throughout the DMV and beyond. A rare find in the fine art space: artists manage their own sales and receive 100% of sales completed while work is displayed at Culture House.