Contemporary Recycled Tapestry

When I was in Indiana a few weeks ago I visited the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I had seen photos of tapestries created by African artist El Anatsui but had never seen one in person. Wow -- they are composed of recycled, flattened liquor bottle caps (aluminum) joined together with copper wire. I wish I had been able to photograph it up close. It is spectacular from a distance and captivating on close inspection. This piece is 17 feet wide and hung so that it undulates. The museum website has a video clip that shows its installation along with some closeups and commentary about the piece. Very inspiring!

Ailey Impressions

I saw the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater today. What an amazing performance. So many effortless looking movements and intriguing choreography, amazing artistry and athleticism. I kept thinking how great it would be to photograph the dancers, even though it would be a blur, and use some of those abstract qualities as the basis for a collage composition. I have several pieces that I feel were influenced by my daughter's ballet studies. They are more carefully composed and balanced, as ballet tends to be. The photo shows a piece called "Arabesque" that was done quite some time ago. It would be fun to try something along those lines that incorporates more movement and speed. It is great when one kind of art is able to lend ideas to another kind of medium -- it was a very inspiring afternoon.

Violets

Must be spring... violets are trying to break loose of the snow and undergrowth. I love the patterns of the downed grasses and the bright purple color punctuations. Not to mention the first signs of green!

Reconstructing Imagery

Last Thursday I went to a meeting of the Open Shelf Book Club at the Museum of Contemporary Art | Denver. Jasper de Beijer was discussing books and media that have influenced his work, now on view in the museum's Paper Works Gallery. The book he selected for our discussion next time is Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine... he talked about the one-dimensional thinking it exposes and mentioned that it is a somewhat difficult read. He said it was like "staring into the abyss of the soul..."

Several of us went up to the gallery afterwards and saw the show. His work is amazing. It was great to be able to ask him questions about his process. He builds representations of something that interests him and that he has studied -- using digital imagery, modelling, and some collage techniques -- and then photographs the models. Some of his models are on display along with a lot of the photographs. I was most taken with a series of 3-dimensional heads that he had collaged imagery onto -- busts of men who had suffered shell shock in WWI. The patched-together, collaged, 3D heads are quite interesting themselves but the photographic treatment flattens the imagery and really conveys their wounds and emptiness. The photo at top left is a detail from one of the heads to show how the imagery is joined... he said he mostly uses spray adhesive. If you click here, you can see his body of work and the larger image this detail comes from.

He talked a lot about our dis-association with photographed images from history. "...de Beijer has been reconstructing imagery that has become autonomous in the course of history, using existing sources to create a new reality." So then, what is "real"?