These elaborate rooms are now also punctuated by contemporary lighting, museum signage indicating visitors' routes, and emergency exits. The humidity and temperature monitors and laser-beam security guard against visitors, keeping their curiosity, lumbering bags, and body heat at a safe distance from the artworks and furnishings. Even the velvet curtains are protected by silk netting, while the burgundy silk cords foil any desire to caress the luxurious surfaces. The sensuous images in Impossible Gaze rekindle this palpability, yet offer no tactile gratification. Although the viewer cannot touch the objects in the photographs, they can, as Vivian Sobchack proposes, feel their “texture and weight.” 1

In a strange act of doubling, Impossible Gaze creates another intense visual experience as it concentrates on the sensorial act of viewing. This work constructs much more than the communion between the viewer's eye and the singular artwork by alluding to the other senses that come into play in this environment of historic museums. Ironically, Jean Baudrillard suggests that “to make an image of an object is to strip the object of all its dimensions one by one: weight, relief, smell, depth, time, continuity and, of course, meaning.” 2 Yet these are the very qualities these photographs call upon. They are “haptic” images in that, as Laura Marks explains, they “engage the viewer tactilely.” 3 In The Skin of the Film Marks elaborates on the difference between optical and haptic vision.

Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze… While optical perception privileges the representational power of the image, haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image. 4

This materiality is brought to the fore in Impossible Gaze as the camera lens dwells on the delicate textures belonging to history and re-presents them in the fragile form of photographic paper. Importantly, as Marks notes, depending on the viewer's “own sensoria,” experiences in museums, and by extension in my exhibition, will be different. 5 The encounter is transformed for each individual visitor as the art viewed is imbued with the sum total of experience and encumbered by myriad eccentricities that govern audience engagement and response.

1. Vivian Carol Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” Special Effects/Special Affects: Technologies of the Screen , Symposium, (conference paper) Melbourne , March 25, 2000.

2. Jean Baudrillard, “For Illusion Isn't the Opposite of Reality,” in Fotografien – Photographies – Photographs: 1985-1998 (Ostflidern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1999), 130.

3. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, ( Durham : Duke University Press, 2000), 22.

4. Ibid.,162-3.

5. Ibid., 23.