#arts 3372

The first museum I took a tour of was the Griffin. They had a lot of interesting shots from a variety of styles. There were botanical close-ups, documentary style photographs of people and architecture, photo collages of different buildings, and more. One photo in particular that I liked was a surrealist photograph of a rollercoaster on top of the ocean. I like how the roller coaster cuts up the negative space of the photo. I also like how the black of the track mirrors the black of the rocky coast next to it. Similarly, the color of the sky is similar to that of the ocean, and it gives the whole piece a sense of symmetry that’s broken by the rollercoaster.

               The Second museum I took a tour of was Fotofest and their exhibit The Pleasure of Unintended Consequences. The exhibit featured the work of 3 artists, Pablo Gimenez Zapiola, Anderson Wangle and Martin Amorous. The exhibit was about happy accidents in the creative process that serve as inspirations for a body of work. This piece by Pablo Gimenez Zapiola is part of his “Night Tree” series. These are photos taken at night by shining a flashlight up into the trees. I really like this piece because I love how the trees sort of fade into the background, it makes them look like they’re growing from the edges of the photograph. I love how the flashlight hitting the trees creates this implied circle in the center of the piece. I love the shapes the trees carve out in the negative space of this piece, I think the shapes they make are really interesting. I also love how this is just different from anything I’ve seen before. The novelty of it enhances its appeal, though by saying that I don’t mean to take away from the compositions themselves which are quite good.

               The final museum I took a tour of was the Brooklyn Museum. I had trouble finding photographs at the brooklyn museum, but I found some rather high quality ones in their exhibit entitled Two Dutch Houses: Meet the Schenks. The exhibit is about the reproduction of 2 houses that have existed in Brooklyn for centuries, and it contains some brilliant photographs of their interiors and exteriors. My personal favorite of which being this one. I really like the color scheme in this photo. The pastel blue and the white work well together to create a soft feeling. The blue is accented by the orange-brown wood, which complements it nicely. We also have dark brown in the form of the chair, door handle, and grandfather clock. I really like the symmetry of this photograph, and I like how the door is placed in the dead center. It creates a division of space that I find rather pleasant. I love how the pastel blue and white are found throughout the piece, I think it does a great job of making the piece visually cohesive.

This collection is titled “Containment and Control”. Being stuck in my house the past few months has made me think a lot about the spaces we live in. Specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much control we each have over our environment, and the limitations of that control. It seems obvious in light of the current pandemic that humans are affected by their environment just as much as other animals, and that even with our modern technology there are some aspects we cannot control. So, for my collection, I decided to focus on the ways in which we shape our home environments and the ways that our environment affects us.

Following this theme, most of my pieces focus on shelving or containers. Conceptually, we can understand furniture to be a way for homeowners to express their desires onto their environment. Of all furniture, shelves and containers allow for greater expression still; they give us structure, they allow us to organize seemingly disconnected objects and bring them together to create a greater meaning. Of course, humans cannot control everything in their environment, and to draw attention to that I used a few shots of nature viewed through windows. Symbolically, these photographs represent a desire for unrestricted movement and a tacit acceptance that for now these outdoor spaces are partially locked away.

Human Geography: The Body as Home

The human body is a point of infinite fascination to me. As my body changes day-to-day, year-to-year, so too does my personhood. This vessel which travels with me through life is never the same and has weather unkindness and tenderness from myself and others. I rest heavy in her, an oak with roots that run from head to toe, speaking joy and sorrow and everything in between.

Of late, I’ve been feeling quite at home in my body. The days spent alone and isolated run by, each blending into the other. In the uncertainty of pandemic life, my body rests heavy when I rests, and it delights in movement when I move. Grounding and centering myself in my body has been a centering and calming practice through the tumult of pandemic life.

I wanted to honor and exalt this body I inhabit through a series of photographs in which I use light and composition to abstract my body to the point of seeming like alien geography. I didn’t want to lose the focus entirely and so chose to include signals that cue familiarity within the photographs. These small details help forge a connection between recognition, abstraction, containment, and freedom.