Canadian artist/designer Jess Atkinson‘s wonderful “pair of non-prescription glasses that function as an anti-lonely device, giving the user the feeling of being surrounded by people when worn” brings to mind Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” (1884), though the former’s mildly self-effacing title shows a playfulness that, perhaps, will make the lonely day past quicker.

Pointillism (as with Fauvism and Cubism) follows the trajectory of impressionism and branches off into its own pictorial inquiry. Cameras had been invented, which lead to the death of mimesis; the only thing worth recording now was our subjective experience. Seurat’s point was that our perception of light was an aggregate of many dots of color, pixel perfect to me, 300dpi baby. Ahead of his time, in 1888, he paints “The Models,” depicting said subjects in front of his masterpiece.

He did many studies, all of them either with or without the bourgeois cast — except for one charcoal study with a sole dog, perhaps a few hours too late, sniffing for a buddy, hoping for a crumb. Maybe all of us think we’re the dog. Maybe our world too is full of people who have left, that every party we go to feels like a charcoal study. (Existentialism is fun in France, but fuck, the feeling sucks.) Then there is art: to explore, honor, and legitimize feelings, however illegitimate they seem. Art is a pair of lonely glasses — filling up a 3D world with 2D props. This dimensional discrepancy, this blind audacity, is not quantum physics, but simply, art, which is why I’m less lonely. Jess, you’re awesome, I love it. And Georges, you ain’t so bad yourself.