Current Exhibits

Kurt Weston: Seasons in the Prayer Garden
February 4 to March 28, Free

Kurt Weston is a legally blind photographer who works in both color and black and white.

“My limited visual acuity–total blindness in my left eye and limited peripheral vision with no central vision in my right eye–permits me to see the world much like it appears in an impressionist painting.” Using digital magnification, the artist views and augments images initially seen only through his limited peripheral vision.

For the past several years, Weston has been experimenting with unusual and altered photographic “views” and “perspectives” that redefine and recontextualize the very nature of seeing for both the sighted and blind communities.

His precisely detailed, saturated colored images of garden flowers capture an unsettling individualism in each blossom. These almost other-worldly portraits bypass conventional ideas of nature photography by confronting the viewer with singular instances of the strangeness of beauty itself. Hillsides and parks are experienced in sometimes fleeting, sometimes still, sometimes even out of focus mesmerizing tapestries of living color, sweeping the viewer into the world of the artist’s unique vision.

“Seeing, as we all know, is a combination of all our physical, mental, psychological and spiritual states,” Weston says. “We speak about ‘seeing’ something clearly as seeing something accurately, truthfully and in its entirety.”

Kurt Weston earned his MFA from the California State University, Fullerton. His work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in New York and other venues. In 2009, his work was included in the California Museum of Photography’s acclaimed exhibition “Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists.” (Currently scheduled to tour internationally.)