Chad Allen
Artworks
Unseen: Episode 1, 2020. Audio comic. Courtesy of the artist.
Unseen Cover Art/Portrait of Afsana by Thomas Rodgers.
Image description: A digital portraif of a woman, the character Afsana, showing her face from the neck up with a red background. She has short black hair and long bangs that sweep to the right side of her face. She is looking at the viewer with a neutral expression. The left side of her face has pinkish skin tones, while the right side has gray tones. A thick, translucent criss-cross pattern covers her eyes and forehead. The word UNSEEN is written in white capital letters near the top of her head.
Set in the near future, Unseen is an audio comic created by a blind writer for a blind (and sighted) audience. Unseen is the story of Afsana, a blind assassin living in a chaotic world in which she is invisible to society. “Discounting Afsana’s abilities is her enemies’ gravest regret,” says Allen.
Early in this narrative, we begin to understand the artist’s intention to reframe our perceptions of vision and blind people. By centering the narrative around a disabled woman of color, he highlights the experience of being “othered” and dismissed, overlooked, and ignored. In this first episode of the comic, the artist takes us to the US/Mexico border, where Afsana, a refugee from Afghanistan, is on a mission to destroy the lab of Dr Magnus, an evil scientist conducting experiments on immigrants and people with disabilities.
About the Artist
“You don’t see art with your eyes. You don’t see anything with your eyes. All your eyes do is filter light. You see with your brain, and that’s what I’m trying to teach people more than anything …”—Chad Allen
Chad Allen lives in Los Angeles and studied art at Rocky Mountain College in Montana. He is a writer and professional magician, and has appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us and America's Got Talent. Unseen was first shown at the Exploratorium in San Francisco as a part the exhibit Self, Made in 2019. Allen's next project is a vampire story.