EMILY SPER: RADICAL PERCEPTION

Emily Sper: Radical Perception

October 2– November 1, 2026

What happens when reality looks manipulated—but isn’t?

In Radical Perception, photographer Emily Sper transforms ordinary moments into visually complex compositions that hover between photography and abstract painting. Layers of ice, water, trees, leaves, reflections, shadows, glass, colors, and shapes merge within a single frame, creating images that can appear digitally altered or constructed through multiple exposures. They are not.

Sper finds these illusions already existing in the world.

Walking for miles at home and while traveling, she searches for unexpected relationships between natural and human-made environments: a reflection crossing a surface, a landscape fragmented by ice, or colors and forms momentarily aligning through glass.

Printed at a large scale and, in some works, on fine-art papers such as Arches, the photographs acquire a tactile, painterly presence that further challenges the boundary between photography and abstraction.

Radical Perception invites us to slow down and question what we think we see. Sper reminds us that extraordinary images do not always need to be created or manipulated. Sometimes they simply need to be noticed.

Nothing needs to be invented. The illusion is already there.

Free and open to the public.

View the exhibition on ARTSY