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Trust Your Eyes

Over the years, I've hosted exhibitions where something puzzled me. The artist's statement would describe one thing, a deep exploration of memory perhaps, or a meditation on urban isolation, but when I looked at the actual work, I couldn't see it. The gap between what I was being told and what I was seeing felt wide enough to notice.

My background is as a photographer, not an art critic. I look at work the way a maker does: I see composition, light, form, subject matter, how something is executed. When a statement talks about something I don't see in the work itself, I notice. Not because I'm being critical, but because my eye is trained to see what's actually present.

This gap between artistic intention and execution is rich territory. It touches on something fundamental about how art actually communicates. Sometimes artists are better at making than explaining. Sometimes the work knows more than the artist does, it contains discoveries made in the process that weren't part of the original plan. And sometimes a statement becomes aspirational rather than descriptive, describing what the artist wanted to achieve rather than what actually happened.

For the museum, this matters. If even the artist's own statement doesn't always capture what the work actually does, it reinforces why letting viewers discover their own relationship with art is so important. Our mission is about creating spaces "where love stories develop between art and viewer," and those love stories happen through what's visible, not through explanation.

This is why we position ourselves as enablers rather than educators. We're not here to tell you what to see or how to interpret. We create the conditions for you to meet the art directly, with your own eyes, your own experience, your own discoveries.

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