There is a version of seeing that only happens when you stop expecting to see clearly.
Better Views brings together ten artists working through that idea from ten different directions. A face burns gold from the inside, its eyes turned to light instead of sight, half submerged like it's already leaving. A young man looks back at us with one eye open and one gone milky and shut, the sea behind him going on like nothing happened. A schoolgirl sits for her portrait in grayscale, haloed in the colors of the flag, and underneath her, in handwriting too calm for what it says, the words read: I don't feel safe. A door handle becomes a whole world under close attention, its steel rings and shadow suddenly worth staring at longer than a doorknob should ever get stared at. An offering is rendered in a green no chapel would recognize, devotion turned strange and lit from within. A hooded figure grips a hammer in front of a wall of scrawled red script, giving away everything in the eyes and nothing anywhere else. A whole head has been carved into a lit candle, the flame still climbing, the face underneath only half resolved, like it stopped becoming a face halfway through the thought. Wildflowers glow white against a night gone completely black. An old fashioned bouquet sits in its own pool of shadow, holding onto more light than a bouquet painted this dark has any right to. A gummy bear and a heart shaped lollipop, painted in unsettling reds, ask what a treat costs once you look at it long enough to call it blood and sugar instead of candy. Three figures walk a green hillside holding hands, and the one in the middle isn't flesh at all. She's bronze. No one on the hill seems to notice.
None of these works ask to be understood on the first look. They ask for the second one. The look that comes after you've already decided what something is, right before it changes on you.
