The Strother School of Radical Attention is pleased to present an exhibition of the three finalists of EYES UP!, the school’s first open call for artists: Eleanor Furness, Franco Leon, and Juno Tatarka. Paying homage to the history of posters, zines, and ephemera in movement politics, the open call invited visual inquiry on the school’s core mission of Attention Activism through the dynamics of reference, recontextualization, and circulation across reproducible media. Accordingly, the exhibition highlights each artist’s paths of attention alongside their final design, through menageries of their referential materials, in-progress sketches, and alternate versions. Of note are the artists’ inquiry on attention as conduits between physical and symbolic realities—and therefore, on the importance of synchronizing transhistorical critique on man made systems on the one hand, and immediate, embodied experiences of the “astonishing reality of things” on the other. In Eyes Toward Each Other, Juno Tatarka places the childlike state of curiosity, wide-eyed facing the world and each other, at the center of our communal path to human flourishing. Their choice of green monochrome, a symbolically potent color with associations to growth and regeneration, reflects the convergence between multiple liberations: of the land, of people, and of imaginations.

In Your Attention Is For Sale, Eleanor Furness invites a comparative investigation on various visualizations of the mechanisms of attention, from images of a human brain under a microscope sourced from a neuroanatomy textbook and an electroretinogram to a drawing by Ibn al-Haytham from 1027. Printed on receipt paper, the material both confirms the accessibility of attention activism as a tool for collective liberation and calls attention to the transactional structure underlying image culture in the present day. Franco León’s The stone is a seed envisions an alternate ending to The Extraction of the Stone of Madness by Hieronymus Bosch, through the format of a scientific drawing. The “stone” removed from an individual’s head to cure madness in Bosch’s drawing now emerges as a flower in full bloom, not only resisting the mutilation of lived truths but also manifesting cerebral ideas out towards the material world. Alongside the three artists, selected designs by open call participants Caitlin Quintero Weaver, Etta Lund, Gloria Mungai, Marcela Mulholland, Kristilyn Waite, Seb Genikov, and Mark Fongheiser & Rahel Tebo will showcase the versatile convergences between movement politics and design in the current day. Visitors are encouraged to enjoy all designs in conversation with the school’s ongoing programs—and as integrated design elements heralding the variously-activated space as a “sanctuary of attention.”