Thursday, June 4, 2015

Event - Making Strange Exhibition

I also attended the Making Strange exhibition in Fowler Museum. This exhibition was created by Vivan Sundaram who is a contemporary artist who lives in Delhi. First of all, I thought it was interesting to see art from India. This art from India is unlike any art that I have seen before. That is because it is made from recycled materials and medical supplies. I thought this was a very interesting concept and one that is very forward looking in our society. It not only combines medicine and art by using medical supplies as art but if artists were able to use recycled goods for all of their art in the future I believe that would be great as well. The exhibit contains twenty-seven sculptures made from foam cups, surgical masks, hospital bandages and more. This part of the exhibit was known as Gagawaka and Sundaram paired this part of the exhibit with another set of sculptures known as Postmortem. The Postmortem exhibit stayed with the medicine and art theme by depicting the human body with anatomical models that examined aging and sickness. I believe that Sundaram was attempting to shed light on medicine, aging and conservation. Essentially he demonstrated how the human body will age but through the use of medicine we can prolong that process. Further, we must be able to conserve for humans to be able to age gracefully and medicine to have a lasting impact on our society. I hope this exhibit brings to light the ideas of conservation in today's society. I believe that if everyone could see this exhibit, they would realize the beauty of the acts of conservation and this idea would spread across the globe. Hopefully it could influence the way people see the world and that we want and need to sustain it for our future generations. Further, if an artist in a highly densely populated area like India can create this art using recycled goods, there is no reason that contemporary artists in the United States can't do the same. 



Me in front of a few sculptures
Sculptures made from recycled goods
The front of the exhibit

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Event 2 - Fowler museum

I visited the Fowler museum and saw the Reflecting Culture exhibit for the Fowler Collection of Silver. I thoroughly enjoyed other exhibits at the museum but this one stood out to me the most for me to write about. This exhibit contained 251 different objects that came from Europe, Britain and the United States. The silver objects were all still in great condition which I thought was pretty remarkable. The objects came from well known silversmiths and jewelers such as Paul de Lamerie from Britain, Karl Faberge from Russia and Paul Revere from the United States. What I thought was most interesting about this exhibit was that these pieces of silver can convey what is going on at that time period. For example, comparing the silver from Paul Revere in the United States looked similar to some of the contemporary silver from Britain. This made me realize that even though the United States and Britain are across the Atlantic Ocean, they share these creative similarities. The colonies that came from Britain significantly influenced the United States's social culture. Furthermore, it seemed that silver in this time period demonstrated societal hierarchy. Citizens who had wealth had these nice pieces of silver. It showed that they had money and that they needed to have it in their cabinets or on their tables so that others could see it and think highly of them or status. 

This exhibit therefore really connects to me on the combination of society and art. Art can be a reflection of the ongoing societal norms. We can use it to gain insight into the past to see how people lived and how people with different socioeconomic backgrounds lived as well. I never thought that this would be the case before I took this class, but after learning about society and art and then actually viewing it in an exhibit, the connection really took hold. I would recommend this exhibit to anyone looking for insight into our past world. 

The sign for the entrance to the Fowler Collection of Silver
Image from a collection of silver




Me in front of the Fowler Collection of Silver

Event 1 - Hammer museum

For my first event, I visited the Hammer museum looking at the the Charles Gaines gridwork that he developed. It was definitely an amazing experience visiting the museum and the reason why I chose to take pictures at this specific exhibit while visiting the rest of the museum is because Gaines made his pictures or "gridwork" using numbers. He drew a number, 1 through 9, in small centimeter by centimeter squares that culminated in an entire picture. I thought this was unique and it appealed to be as well because I too like numbers. This was an exhibit that also related to our topic mathematics and art. Not only did the pieces of art contain numbers, but they had to be systematically placed and aligned in order to come together in a final piece. Each color was a part of the rest of the grid that came together to make the pictures of the trees. I had really never seen anything like this before in my life, and it got me to think that this may be something that I could actually venture into. I am not a great artist by any means when it comes to any kind of freehand drawing. However, if I was able to mathematically create a drawing using a type of grid, and then just had to fill in the grid with different colors, I believe I could be able to do that. Perhaps this is a possible entry to a future career that I can have or it is a possible future hobby. Either way this exhibit made me very fascinated about this specific type of art, and pushed my thinking to another level. 


Photo outworn the Charles Gaines exhibit
Me outside the Hammer museum!
Me in front of four of Gaines' works of art