Seeing Water Lilies
Seeing Water Lilies
2019
Three-channel video installation (color, sound), 6:18 minutes
Seeing Water Lilies is a three-channel video that reflects on what it means to see art in the absence of sight. The video is an exchange between Karen, who is legally blind, and the artist. The two met in 2013 at the Guggenheim Museum where Maya leads verbal description tours for people who are blind or have low vision. Here, Karen describes a work of art from memory, while the artist “recreates” that work based on her description. The video features verbal description, which uses evocative language to convey the visual world to people who are blind, in an attempt to understand how language succeeds and fails in communicating our sensory experiences of the world.