Andra Ursuța: Retina Turner

Retina Turner stages vision at the edge of exhaustion. Presented in the artist’s first exhibition at our New York gallery, the new body of work comprises sixteen monumental, egg-shaped slabs of cast glass. Each slab contains spectral presences—Private Dancers, human-machine hybrids who glide, stutter, or dissolve beneath crystalline surfaces. Hypnotic and elusive, they perform the instability of sight in a moment when looking has become retinal apathy, overburdened and hollowed out.

Never in history has humanity produced more images, or made more of the world visible faster. Everything can be shown, easily and instantly. Yet this saturation has not led to clarity. Instead, vision has become diffuse, repetitive, exhausted—a glut of images that occludes the very possibility of the visionary. Ursuţa’s Private Dancers dwell precisely here, in the gap between the infinite production of images and a faltering, rolling eye.

The works are assembled from fragments—anthropomorphically reconstituted studio flotsam, improvised bodies, visual snow that drifts across the field of sight. In these monumentalized fragments, what remains to be seen is not the spectacle outside but the noise within. The unspeakable can only be shown—not through representations of the world, already stripped bare, but through training the eye onto itself.

The slabs’ ovoid forms evoke astigmatic eyes deformed by pathology. Some are cast in lead crystal, exposing fossils trapped inside. Others are made of murrine glass, an ancient technique in which colored rods are fused and sliced to reveal patterned cross sections.

Retina Turner asks what it means to look when looking has become compulsive, when everything has already been made visible. Ursuţa’s Private Dancers do not provide clarity; they flicker at the edge of legibility, half formed, half dissolved.

They suggest that vision is not a matter of revelation but of haunting, not the discovery of the new but the recycling of perceptual debris. In their opacity, these works press a troubling truth: in an age flooded with images, the only visions left to us are the ones that arise when sight begins to fail.