Description
LOOK & SEE is a Conceptual Art Sculpture from Steit’s ongoing Senses Project, a conceptual series that has used the six primary human senses as both subject and structural principle since its origins at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam in the early 1990s. Where companion works in the series address hearing, touch, taste, smell, and learning, this piece turns to the most dominant of all human senses, sight, and immediately splits it in two.
As with the other works in the series, the piece presents its two words as a single interlocked typographic mass, fabricated through 3D printing and internally lit with LED illumination. The letterforms interweave and overlap, so that look and see are encountered together before they can be considered apart. The eye takes in the whole object before the mind separates its meaning.
That separation is where the work lives. Looking is directional and automatic. We point our eyes at the world and it returns an image. Seeing is something else: an act of attention, interpretation, and recognition that transforms what is merely visible into what is actually understood. By merging the two into one glowing, inseparable form, the work poses a question that is simple to read and less simple to answer: how much of what we look at do we ever truly see?
The light does what light does throughout this series. It arrives before the words do. The diffuse halo spreading beyond the letterforms into the surrounding wall creates an immediate optical event, drawing the viewer in before any reading has taken place. The object enacts its own argument: we look first, and only afterwards, if we make the effort, we see.
Consistent with Steit’s broader practice, LOOK & SEE prioritises idea over spectacle. It does not illustrate its subject so much as embody it. a conversation the artist initiates, and the viewer is invited to complete.
Original artwork specifications
- 3D Printed PETG
- 24v LED Lighting + power supply
- Black Lettering and translucent honeycomb white surfaces
- Text: 57 x 30 x 7cm – Power: 20 x 6 x 3 cm
- Unique artwork