Canadian artists Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett have created sea/see/saw, a temporary kinetic sculpture made from 14,000 used eyeglass lenses, that was commission for the 10th Anniversary of the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey.
The artist’s description
The sculpture was designed to mirror the dynamic and shimmering surface of the Golden Horn (Bosphorus) below. Introducing chaotic movement to the otherwise static structure, sea/see/saw creates pixilated ripples across the face of the building, as drawn by the wind.
Built from incremental, readily available elements (glasses) that merge to create a simple, geometric form (a circle), the sculpture invites the viewer to engage in a momentary shift of perspective.
If eyes are “windows to the soul,” how do lenses revise our vision of the world around us? What presences are evoked by thousands of human objects, especially materials so tied to essential mechanisms of sight? Do our former accessories carry faint ghosts of those who used them?
As the materiality of the installation becomes apparent, the watchers become the watched, and this spectacle of spectacles takes on another subtext – as an icon for collective vision, compound perspectives, and the power of collaborative sight.
The artists invited communities in Istanbul and Calgary to contribute unwanted eye wear to the installation. A majority of the glasses were sourced from the Canadian Lions Eyeglass Recycling Centre, an entity working internationally to aid millions of vision-impaired people around the world.
The lenses used for the sculpture were salvaged from un-reusable eyeglasses, and acquired through a modest donation. To donate glasses in Canada, visit: CLERC
