OPTICALITY: SEEING IN THE WAY OF THINGS (2026)
Introduction | About the Artists | Opticality Research Project | Support
Introduction
liquid blackness is excited to announce its first “Encounters in the Black Arts” event.
Join us at Auburn Research Library auditorium on Saturday, March 7, at 3pm to reflect together on “Opticality: Seeing in the Way of Things.”
We will be joined by film cinematographer, Shawn Peters, and colorists and director, Kya Lou, who work across the stages of film production and move in and out of commercial, music video, narrative, and installation filmmaking.
Inspired by Bradford Young’s claim that cinema is a weapon and that the lens is the last (and most neglected) frontier between image and viewer, opticality considers what artists see through and how they cultivate their way of seeing. For Young, this is the lens—glass sitting between filmstrip and world—but we ask: what are the other lenses through which artists see? What values, commitments and sensibilities shape how they approach filmmaking?
Opticality provokes us to ask how artists prepare, how they study, but also how they practice resisting this separation. Like the woodshedding jazz musician (a mode of practice we learned from cinematographer Chayse Irvin), how do artists work out their technique, find their foundation, and cultivate their phrasing so they can ultimately improvise with others? How might we come to see outside ourselves? Not to see as, but to see beside and with another?
Event Schedule
Saturday, March 7, 3pm
Panel Conversation and Q&A with Shawn Peters and Kya Lou
Auburn Research Library: 101 Auburn Ave. NE, Atlanta, GA 30303
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
About the Artists
Shawn Peters, a cinematographer and photographer, works across commercial, music video (Common’s Say Peace (2020), Solange Knowles’s Dreams (2019)) and narrative (Random Acts of Flyness (2018), The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2022)) filmmaking and has been a frequent collaborator of filmmakers Terence Nance and Bradford Young.
Kya Lou, a colorist, director, and editor, has worked on projects from Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions (2025), Darol Olu Kae’s Keeping Time (2023), Terence Nance’s André 3000: New Blue Sun (2023), and her own video installation of found footage for Derek Fordjour’s exhibition Nightsong (2025) and for Edges of Ailey (with Josh Begley, 2024).
Support
Liquid Blackness, Limited