Three Reviews of the Art Events

Meeting artist lecture: Steven Lambert
            I went to the lecture held by Steven Lambert on February 20th. In the beginning, Lambert asked us to do as an exercise: closing your eyes and imaging if you were a superhero, what were the top third things you wanted to do? Then, he started to introduce himself and some of his works. Lambert's father is a monk and his mother is a nun. Spending most of his childhood in his parents' charity shop in San Francisco, he was immersed in the environment of dedication and helping others. The two main projects he mainly told about were Capitalism Works For Me! True/False and NY Times Special Edition. 

Capitalism Works For Me! True/False is an electrical board with a true and a false screen that counts the number of votes. It asks viewers to think whether capitalism works for them or not then vote yes or no by the buttons. Lambert showed some interviews about how the interviewee made the decision. Interestingly, many people answered the questions based on their reactions to some specific experiences they had been through.

            NYTime Special Edition is probably one of Lambert's most famous projects. When President Obama won the election of 2008, Lambert and his collaborates wanted to hold a ceremony. Because they found out people were often being negative to events, they changed their mind of the ceremony and decided to do this project in an opposite way. By making lots of copies of NY Time Special Edition, they publised all the good news (i.e.: the headline was "Iraq War Ends") and gave them out for free on the streets. At first, people who read the news were stunned and surprised, but then realize it was just a "special edition". Like Capitalism Works For Me!, Lambert showed some videos of the changing on people’s faces.

At the end of lecture, the superhero exercise was brought up again as a conclusion. Lambert told us that we were just like superhero and art was our superpower. Art had the ability of leading certain emotions or rational responds. By making great art, we could make some positive effects to this world.

I was surprised by the NY Time project. Everything has various aspects, but we often view things by following the general ideas. NY Time Special Edition used the different side to respond events and it seems to send the message more effectively than judging with negative thoughts. I also agree what Lambert said about art as the superpower. We all have some level of sensibility to what happen around us, but being an artist makes us know how to relate things we care with art and transmit the idea to people to let them care as well.

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BFA Thesis 1 Exhibition
            I visited a BFA thesis gallery in the early of March. Even though there were two parts in this exhibition, I want to only focus on one student’s work. Painted Bodies: Color Theory and Practice was a series of artworks made by Brandon Lacow. The works were shown in the different size and color of squares and rectangles. Every frame was filled with either nude male or female models. On Lacow’s thesis statement, he was kind of inspired by the art history of nudity. This project expressed his interested of human body and it tended to reflect his past works.

Nudity is often connected with human sexuality, which is part of our natural expression. However, we always cover our bodies and consider being naked as guilt. In Painted Bodies, I think the author used the boards in various sizes to indicate the restriction of our desire to sexuality. By applying colors into the works, they could influence the viewer's emotions about nudity. Even though the topics all related to nudity, each color had given different definitions. I really like how Lacow applied colors to his work. However, I found out that he used bright colors (white, pink, red, and gold yellow) to all pictures with female models and cold colors (black, green, sky blue, and navy blue) for the male models. Perhaps he wanted to let the viewers recognize the gender more easily, but I think it would be good as well if the colors could be used randomly regardless of sexes. Because our genders are not only just limited in biological characteristic, but also depend on gender identification, gender expression, and gender orientation, colors can be used more complicatedly.

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Bodymaps

            Bodymaps is a unique digital artwork that involves multiple media, including drawing, photograph, animation, and music. It was created eight years ago by Erika Harrsch and her collaborators, Paola Prestini, and Jeffrey Zeigler. According to the interview at the end, Harrsch mentioned that the whole process of this project took about five months. Erika Harrsch is the 2014 artist in resident in UNR. She was charged for the visuals of Bodymaps, that is, she made the drawings, photographs, videos, and then put them all together into a 15 minutes-long animated video by using After Effects and other software. Paola Prestini is the composer of this project and Jeffrey Zeiglier is a cello musician who also played for this performance.

The animation is required to be triggered to play by the sound of cello. In general, a vocal also sings with it. But the voice only came with the animation in this performance. As its name called, Bodymaps illustrates different body parts one by one. It is exactly like looking a map. Each part implies certain experience of life. Butterflies have appeared twice in this project. When I looked up Harrsch's website, it said she often used butterflies as the connection of human natures and its weakness. At the first time, a butterfly is shown on a drawing of human hand, and its wings are partly broken. I think it represents a lot of time we try to violet human natures and overcome our fragility. However, they have deeply rooted in our souls. We could not get rid of them even if putting full effort in it. The hand may be symbolized as human because our hands are the most well developed body structure and they play a significant role in our daily lives. Butterflies appear again at the end of the performance, but they came as a group flying in a circle. In this part I think butterflies emphasize our natures and weakness.

The music of Bodymaps is also meaningful. In these 15 minutes, the song sometimes goes smoothly. Then it becomes energetic and ends with the soft tone. The melody sounds powerful but also sad at the same time. I think the whole tune corresponds to our lives, which often express human strength and fragility repeatedly.