When I visited New York City on the Art Department Trip on April 8th, I visited some free galleries in Chelsea.
The first place that I am going to talk about was the gallery exhibition created by Philip Ording and Alexandra Whitney called Proofs and Refutations. The entire exhibit involved math and numbers. Once you walked inside, there was a sign telling you to count the number of pieces in the exhibit and then ask the woman sitting at the desk for the answer. The installation is a collaboration of about 18 artists works. The main theme of the installation is to show the relationship between art and mathematics.
Examples of works that I saw within this installation were the 2 images above, a video recording of a synchronized dance from the 1980s, some photographs, and images of numbers. Then there were more minimalist pieces such as a a series of 3 separate and simple line drawings and a large piece of cardboard suspended high up on a wall with white paper behind it. I think that if the objective of the artists was to make the viewer think hard about the relationship between math and art, the view did just that. It made me want to look further into each piece to find the mathematical/systematic, artistic, or both in each piece.
The next gallery that I visited was Stan Douglas's photography. After taking photography here at the university, it amazed me how prints this large are produced and made me wonder if they did them with computer printing or through manual printing with negatives/chemicals. Mr. Douglas's photos were actually presented by David Zwirner. David Zwirner's work focuses on press photography from the postwar period (1945-1951). Not only does he work with photography, but also with film.
The images that I chose to show are photographs that intrigued me the most. The image of the smoke is extremely high contrast, which I like, and large (about 20x30). Also in high contrast is the second image of what appears to be high heels photographed in extremely low light and what appears to be sitting on top of a mirror. This image caused me to get really close and try to see how the artist created the image. Also included in this exhibition was a picture of a crowd at a hockey game in the 1950s, which I enjoyed.
Overall, I enjoyed seeing the Chelsea area because I had never been there before and it was interesting to see the art that is being created today, as a opposed to the older art that is displayed in museums. I hope to travel back to the Chelsea area to see more.
No comments:
Post a Comment