Sightliness
Project Sightliness offers a quiet but insistent examination of life under the regime of visibility. In a culture increasingly driven by surveillance, where fear masquerades as safety, transparency is no longer optional—it is expected, even demanded. Through the lens of security imaging, Sightliness reveals a strangely elegant archive of personal belongings: purses, backpacks, and bags subjected to inspection, their contents exposed in glowing outlines and ethereal forms.
What makes this project particularly intimate is its method. Before the exhibition opened, regular patrons of the Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts Gallery were invited to participate by surrendering their everyday containers—bags, purses, briefcases—for X-ray scanning. The process was anonymous, voluntary, and non-invasive, but it introduced a moment of vulnerability. The resulting images were printed and displayed on the gallery wall, where many participants encountered these portraits of their possessions for the first time—transformed, abstracted, and unexpectedly beautiful.
These scans, typically fleeting and functional, are reframed as visual compositions—intimate X-ray portraits of the things we carry. What is revealed is more than the objects themselves; it is the architecture of privacy, the poetics of possession, the coded language of identity embedded in the everyday.
By aestheticizing the forensic, Sightliness questions the normalization of intrusion. The work does not simply document an image, it amplifies the tension between visibility and agency. What does it mean to be seen without consent, even in abstraction? What is lost when privacy becomes spectacle? And what unexpected beauty emerges when the intimate is exposed, not by choice, but by policy?
Sightliness invites viewers to look again—closely, critically—at the politics of seeing and being seen.
Sightliness 2015
Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts Gallery, Binghamton, NY
