A F I N E A R T G A L L E R Y E X H I B I T I O N
BY T Y L E R W A L S E T H
About the Show
We’re multifaceted. We all see things individually.
Vis. Optics presents a body of fine art paintings by Tyler Walseth built on a single organizing idea: the lenses through which each of us sees — physical, psychological, transcendent — shapes the spaces of our individual perspectives. Eleven works, one underlying geometric system, and a question with no answer.
Details
We’re multifaceted.
Spaces. Lenses. We all see individually.
Breaking Spaces is a body of fine art that explores lenses and spaces, and emerges from an underlying grid of four vertical rectangles contained within a square. This is the structural logic that makes everything possible: shape, line, proportion, balance — the quiet vibration between spaces. The grid is also made to be broken, with each departure from it becoming a gesture toward the creative, non-linear thinking that rigid systems can never fully contain. The numerical, geometric, and visual possibilities are infinite. They are the starting point for bringing these ideas into form.
From this foundation, these eleven pieces are symbolic of our view of the world through individual “lenses.” These lenses shape our personal beliefs and perceptions of the human experience. These viewpoints shape our individual realities and become the “spaces” from which we each see what’s around us and each other. Like light through lenses, our perspectives can bend, fracture, or invert, and these symbolic mental spaces are not fixed: they can shift, adapt, or fold back on themselves. When we allow for that, when we let these spaces break, things change. Our lenses adjust and evolve. We become willing to hold what the mind and the eyes cannot resolve, and find comfort there rather than confusion. The tension this creates isn't a problem — it’s an invitation: to embrace that two people can encounter the same thing and experience something entirely different. That recognition, quiet as it is, is where acceptance begins, and empathy grows.
Three visual territories run through the collection: the physical, where light refracts and focus softens at the edges — billions of people turning one world into billions of different ones; the psychological, where vibrant or subtle tints color everything we think we see clearly — mood as weather, shaping judgment and emotional longing without our noticing; and the transcendent, where a convex lens suspended in space becomes a portal rather than a window, bending reality the way a threshold bends a life, opening onto dimensions of self that ordinary sight cannot reach.
Together, the work doesn't just depict vision. It enacts it. And in the silence of each piece, it asks the question that has no answer: Is there a way to know if what we see is accurate or actually real?