Description
The all-seeing eye has been a part of American iconography for centuries. It can be found in hand almost daily, looking up at us from the US dollar bill. Ametropia by Hank Willis Thomas x Wide Awakes is a contemporary re-interpretation of the eye in the spirit of today’s Wide Awakes - a boundless collective. It is an elegy of our collective conscious from our collaborative spirit. The original Wide Awakes engaged ways to re-shift reality through art- they would take old songs and write new lyrics to them, for instance, in a kind of remixing play. The modern day (though time is a construct) Wide Awakes are using these same tools to change the status quo.
The Ametropia eye references this experience of waking up to a new awareness and desire for change. Thomas x Wide Awakes push this familiar emblem into a psychedelic space expressing movement. The vocabulary of psychedelia—with its roots in the 1960s counterculture— represents the desire for change.
The work includes optical art component - using this static image and forcing one’s mind to see movement and thus question what we know to be true. This symbolically reshapes our outlook, our lens on the world. It purposefully disorients to force us to shift our perspective in order to maintain balance.
