01 Mar Seeing the Unseen: “Inner Vision” at CSULB Explores the Limits of Perception
by Tyler Stallings
The use of abstraction to probe the intangible—thought, memory, consciousness—has long fascinated artists. Inner Vision: Abstraction and Cognition, curated by Erin Stout at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach, continues this investigation, building on her earlier exhibition The Resonant Surface: Movement, Image, and Sound in California Painting (2021) at UCI’s Institute and Museum of California Art. Where The Resonant Surface considered historical precedents in early to mid-20th-century California painting, Inner Vision brings the inquiry into the present, showcasing contemporary artists who interrogate the neurological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of abstraction.
The exhibition’s scope is ambitious, encompassing perceptual phenomena, the synesthetic relationship between sound and vision, the intersection of abstraction and cultural identity, and the role of painting as a form of personal and collective memory. The featured artists—Terri Friedman, Vian Sora, Robin Mitchell, Adee Roberson, Angeline Rivas, Bridget Mullen, Rema Ghuloum, Dennis Koch, Jodie Mack, Barbara Rossi, and Bhakti Baxter—each approach these ideas through distinct visual languages but share a common interest in abstraction’s ability to express the ineffable.
Expanding the Language of Perception
The conceptual throughline between Inner Vision and The Resonant Surface is most evident in their shared exploration of the sensory and neurological underpinnings of abstraction. Stout’s earlier exhibition at UCI included work by Oskar Fischinger, whose synesthetic paintings sought to translate sound into image. In Inner Vision, this lineage finds a contemporary echo in Terri Friedman’s Green Placebo (2019), a textile work that visualizes the brain’s neuroplasticity and the placebo effect—essentially, the idea that belief itself can induce change. The juxtaposition of structured threadwork with luminous stained glass gestures toward the mind-body connection, much like Fischinger’s own attempts to create “visual music.”
The role of abstraction in conveying psychological or meditative states is another key theme, particularly in Robin Mitchell’s Observatory (2018). With its layers of concentric, pulsating marks, the painting invokes the visual structure of mandalas and mantras, suggesting a rhythmic unfolding of consciousness. Mitchell’s work recalls Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell’s Synchromist paintings, which proposed a one-to-one correspondence between color harmonies and musical chords—an idea that, a century later, still fuels abstract painters’ desire to bridge sensory modalities.
Adding a cinematic dimension to this exploration is Jodie Mack’s Glistening Thrills (2013), a stop-motion film that merges optical science with experimental animation. Using dollar-store gift bags as raw material, Mack transforms kitschy, disposable objects into dazzling, rhythmic patterns of light and movement, pushing the limits of sensory perception. Like Fischinger before her, she embraces abstraction’s ability to mimic musical structures, highlighting the connection between fine art and everyday visual culture.
Painting as an Act of Memory and Resistance
While many of the works in Inner Vision engage with abstraction’s perceptual possibilities, others employ it as a means of historical and personal reckoning. Vian Sora, for example, transforms abstraction into a meditation on war and displacement. Her painting Lapped (2023) features fluid, dripped color fields that suggest both bodily wounds and landscapes in flux. A first-generation immigrant from Baghdad, Sora describes her practice as a means of processing trauma, a sentiment that finds precedent in earlier modernist traditions, such as the Dynaton group’s efforts to visualize alternative realities.
Similarly, Adee Roberson’s Equanimity (2022) ties abstraction to diasporic identity and spiritual continuity. Her painting, rich with neon greens and blues, references the tropical landscapes of the Caribbean and Florida, merging personal memory with broader histories of Black feminist thought. For Roberson, abstraction is not just formal exploration but a way of embodying cultural inheritance—an impulse seen in past artists like Alma Thomas, whose color-driven compositions were deeply tied to her African American heritage and community.
A similar commitment to memory and embodiment is found in Barbara Rossi’s Untitled (Yellow and Black Abstract)(1980-81). As a member of the Chicago Imagists, Rossi was known for her Surrealist-inflected abstraction that explored disjointed, floating forms. This print, with its distorted anatomy and dizzying optical patterns, engages with bodily awareness and disorientation, recalling Indian miniature painting—a major influence on her practice.
Sensory Immersion and the Materiality of Perception
Two of the exhibition’s most immersive works belong to Rema Ghuloum and Bridget Mullen, both of whom explore abstraction as a bodily, visceral experience.
Ghuloum’s Hayat (2022–24) layers oil and acryla-gouache into dense, luminous surfaces, using color as a conduit for sensation. A synesthete, she experiences color in relation to sounds and memories, allowing her paintings to evolve organically, much like a geological formation. Her process of pouring, layering, and sanding down paint creates surfaces that vibrate with accumulated time, reinforcing her belief that paintings should “feel like experiences.” This meditative, tactile approach links Ghuloum’s work to the tradition of process-driven abstraction seen in artists like Lynda Benglis or even the gestural accumulation of light and color in Agnes Martin’s work.
By contrast, Bridget Mullen’s Birthday Series #16 (2021) plays with abstraction’s psychological and surrealist dimensions. Part of an ongoing series, the small-scale work is rooted in a structured creative process: each painting adheres to self-imposed constraints, drawing inspiration from birth imagery. Mullen’s paintings often begin with loose abstract forms that morph into bodily references—eyeballs, hair, internal organs—suggesting the liminal space between figuration and abstraction. Her approach recalls the way surrealists like Joan Miró allowed subconscious forms to emerge from automatist mark-making, but Mullen injects a more bodily, self-referential dimension.
Speculative Futures and the Limits of Representation
Beyond its explorations of memory and perception, Inner Vision also considers abstraction’s role in imagining alternative futures. Angeline Rivas’s Cosmosis.com (2023), with its sleek, airbrushed surfaces and radiant, sci-fi hues, evokes the dissolution of the body into data streams, AI, and hyperreality. The painting asks whether abstraction can provide a visual language for technological and existential transformations—an idea explored in past exhibitions like Unreal City at MCA Chicago, which examined how contemporary artists engage with digital disembodiment.
Likewise, Dennis Koch’s Untitled (Hemispheric Discontinuity-4) (2014) investigates human cognition, drawing on research into parallel processing and the brain’s ability to synthesize multiple visual stimuli. Koch’s work recalls the optical experiments of the 1960s California Light and Space movement, but rather than focusing on physical light, he probes the mind’s interiority, using colored-pencil textures to simulate fluctuating cognitive states.
Bhakti Baxter takes a more metaphysical approach in martin; a portrait (2002), where human hair embedded in oil paint subverts traditional notions of portraiture. The work questions what constitutes an individual’s presence, presenting the self as both material and conceptual. In many ways, Baxter’s portrait encapsulates Inner Vision’s central premise: that abstraction is not a retreat from reality but a deeper engagement with its mysteries.
By drawing together a diverse group of artists working across painting, textiles, film, and conceptual abstraction, Inner Vision offers a compelling argument for the continued relevance of non-representational art as a means of inquiry. Whether through its investigations of cognitive science, cultural identity, or speculative futures, the exhibition affirms that abstraction remains one of the most flexible—and urgent—modes of artistic exploration.
As Erin Stout demonstrated in The Resonant Surface, abstraction’s resonance extends far beyond the gallery walls; it infiltrates how we see, think, and remember. Inner Vision is a worthy successor to that project, reaffirming that the act of making art can still open perceptual doors we never knew existed.
Inner Vision: Abstraction and Cognition, February 13 – May 8, 2025
Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum
Cal State Long Beach, Horn Center
1250 Bellflower Boulevard
Long Beach, CA 90840
https://www.csulb.edu/carolyn-campagna-kleefeld-contemporary-art-museum
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