The Act of Looking by Jana Papantoniou

The Act of Looking pieces together old prints from Jana Papantoniou's personal archives to create new bodies of work in a monochromatic puzzle of pictorial language.

black and white portrait art Image credit: Jana Papantoniou, Installation view, RMIT Graduate Exhibition, 2023. Photo by Panisa Ongwat.

Creating disjointed and abstract monochromatic prints, Jana Papantoniou captures the mundane moments that make up her everyday life. The prints depict people known to the artist, or common objects, but intercut with vivid contrasts, sharp scratches and intense smudges that represent her visual experiences as a legally blind person. 

The Act of Looking brings together these fragmented images in a monochromatic puzzle of pictorial language, externalising the blind experience for a sighted audience. You are invited to look forward and back, to view every panel separately or together as a complete work, but ultimately, these images exist in a permanent state of 'pre-recognition', introducing a new way of looking.

Artist bio

Jana Papantoniou (she/her) is a legally blind emerging artist whose practice destablises societal understandings of blindness as one universal experience. In 2023, Papantoniou completed her honours year at RMIT University, following a Bachelor of Fine Art (visual art) from Victoria College of the Arts (VCA), where she experimented with printmaking and media to visualise her lived experience of blindness. Her practice is physically intensive and tactile, using cotton buds, toothbrushes and her own fingertips, and moving her entire body over the floor to create large-scale, multi-paneled works on paper. This process of working up-close re-frames blindness as an alternative, rather than hindrance, to artmaking.    

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RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

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