Ways of Seeing is a group exhibition that takes its title from John Berger’s seminal essay, which challenged how images are framed, consumed, and understood. Bringing together the practices of Shane Keisuke Berkery, Edward Jones, Gus Monday and Oleksii Shcherbak, the exhibition considers how contemporary painting and image-making continue to negotiate the politics of perception.
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) challenges traditional ideas about art and visual culture by showing how our perception is shaped by context, power, and ideology. He argues that reproducing artworks changes their meaning, since scale, setting, and framing alter how we experience them.
By combining essays with image-only chapters, Berger demonstrates that seeing is never neutral—it is always shaped by history, culture, and power structures.
Ways of Seeing is a group exhibition that takes its title from John Berger’s seminal essay, which challenged how images are framed, consumed, and understood. Bringing together the practices of Shane Keisuke Berkery, Edward Jones, Gus Monday and Oleksii Shcherbak, the exhibition considers how contemporary painting and image-making continue to negotiate the politics of perception. Each artist, in distinct ways, questions what it means to look—whether through layered processes of erasure, the reframing of personal and cultural memory, or the disruption of established visual codes. Together, their works unsettle the notion of seeing as a passive act, proposing instead that vision is always constructed, subjective, and historically situated. In doing so, Ways of Seeing opens a space where the viewer is invited not only to observe but to reflect on the conditions that shape how we experience and interpret images today.
These paintings explore the tension between visibility and obscurity. Built through slow, layered processes of reworking and erasure, the images resist easy recognition. Light fractures across their surfaces, creating spaces that are neither fully objects nor pure illusions, but something in between. The use of a nuanced, muted palette places the work outside familiar time and place. Rather than offering clarity, the paintings withhold, asking the viewer to spend time with them and to accept ambiguity. Many works begin from photographs, collages, or personal archives, but they move beyond documentation. Instead, they become containers for memory, introspection, and imagined states—where the organic and the synthetic coexist in uneasy balance. Rather than giving answers, the paintings invite reflection. They remind us that the spaces we move through are never neutral but shaped by history, politics, and culture, and that looking closely is itself a form of discovery.
Text by Angeliki Kim Perfetti