Eidetic imagery – vivid pictures seen ‘in the mind’s eye’ – has been a powerful and ongoing source of artistic inspiration. Yet, modernist privileging of disembodied vision and positivist opticality has suppressed the realm of the eidetic: an expansive category that includes subjective spiritual, mystical, synesthetic, hallucinatory, and visionary experience.
This panel solicits papers addressing artists past and present who have employed eidetic imagery in the creation or content of their work, as well as from scholars crafting methodological approaches for understanding and historicising artists’ visionary processes. Can art stimulate eidetic experience in its beholders? How might a hermeneutics of the eidetic contribute to a more expansive art history? How do artists represent the invisible? What perceptual modalities and sensory crossovers are engaged in creating or apprehending such art? Can the highly individual nature of reverie or inner vision paradoxically allow artists to communicate with art’s diverse audiences?