Artist Talk: "Beyond the Unreachable Horizon, Linear Perspective and the Global Imagination"

Join us at 5:30 in the Greenlease Gallery for a brief look and reception at our temporary exhibition, “Geometric Aljamía: A Cultural Transliteration” then gather in Sedwick Hall 103 for a presentation by visiting artist Jorge Benitez about linear perspective.

If the horizon is unreachable, then the question of linear perspective should be open-ended. Since the quattrocento (15th-century), philosophers, art historians, theoreticians and theologians have studied the meaning and ramifications of perspective from competing points of view, yet few have addressed its links to the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernity. The navigational developments that allowed Saint Francis Xavier to reach Japan are inseparable from the geometrically driven illusionism of linear perspective. Why did Europe join art and science as it expanded globally in the 1500s and why did the Jesuits embrace that union? How does that legacy affect today’s world? This lecture will visit the relationship between linear perspective and the global imagination in the age of computer assisted design, international popular culture, and postmodern uncertainty.

Please register in advance.