Ana Mendieta

                “Earth-body sculptures” of the late Ana Mendieta, an avant-garde artist who recalled her Cuban roots through visual references. I honestly think these are powerful. and clever. Her haunting art melds the 1970’s concepts of earth art and body art with her ethnic heritage. Created in Iowa and Mexico, the “Silueta” sculptures themselves are transitory. These sculptures are done with such materials as earth, flowers, leaves, fire or blood, so the documenting photographs are considered Mendieta’s art. She is considered a pioneer in environmental and performance art.

                 One beach sculpture consists of red bouganvillea blossoms in the shape of the artist’s body with arms raised. This piece in particular caught my attention more than any other pieces. There's something about this piece that is extremely haunting and I can't get my eyes of it. I finally found out that this piece symbolizes Chango, a principal orisha, always is represented by the color red. His mistress is Yemayá, orisha of the ocean, whose frothy waves represent her lacy petticoats. Mendieta’s art shows Yemayá’s petticoats covering the legs of Chango, whose arms are raised in surprise or delight. Like the ocean, Yemayá represents both a loving and wrathful mother; they say you can take shelter from your enemies under her skirts, but if you provoke her anger, there is nowhere you can hide.

My Earth Project

                  On Wednesday May 11, 2011,  my classmate, Dee and I planted seeds for our art project.   It was fun, but it was dirty to do this project.  My classmate, Dee planted seeds in two separate pots and I was planting in two other pots.  She took many pictures of me planting, and I took many pictures of her.
       
                 We put soil and seeds mixed together into the pots.  We took an empty water bottle from the trash can and filled it with water because we didn't have any another container.  We poured some water into the pots.  I thought the flower seeds looked like grass seed, but as I looked closely, I found the seeds looked more like peanuts.  I really enjoyed hanging out with my classmate, Dee, to do this project.  I was really excited.  However, I didn't like that my hands and fingernails got dirty to do this project.  I hope you enjoy seeing our pictures.

Hussein Chalayan

               Hussein Chalayan is one of those designers whom we fall in love with at first sight. With this highly conceptually designed dress, Hussein Chalayan proposes a sculpted mini dress that is given a 3-D effect by cleverly differentiating color shades and by folding and rolling materials.

              With futurism as a major trend, Hussein Chalayan is ahead of everyone. Never crossing the line towards sci-fi, Chalayan’s designs are highly covetable and highly wearable, a new concept when proposing a futuristic collection.

Robert Smithson

        Spiral Jetty (1970) is an earthwork built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah.  It forms a 1500-foot long and 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake.  The artwork is remarkable.  I've never seen anything quite like this before.

            This counter clockwise spiral that used 600 tons of earth and rock suggested new ways of looking at earth art, in my opinion. Normally conceptual art leaves me unmoved, bored, and cold, but Robert Smithson's ideas electrified me and made me think; it opened inviting worlds for my mind.  The artwork reminded me of an upside down question mark or an incomplete symbol for the treble cleff in music.

Farmlab

On Saturday, April 30, 2011, I went to the Farmlab in downtown Los Angeles.    It is a short-term project exploring land use issues of livability and health.   Farmlab is dedicated to the preservation and perpetuity of all living things and involves change through the development of art.  

I thought I was going to a museum but when I got there it didn’t look like a museum.   Nobody was around and I wandered around outside.   I saw many things in the Farmlab.   The art project that impressed me was the car full of growing plants.  I had never seen anything like this before.   When I saw that car, I thought how they put plant in it.   After I saw this, I want to try doing this to my old car. 

Another thing I saw at the Farmlab is the plant nursery.   When I walked in there, I felt that I went to a flower garden to buy some flowers.   I saw many beautiful plants and flowers.  I especially liked some red flowers because red is my favorite color.

When I went to the Another city is Possible area, I saw three large bags of potable water to be used for watering the earth and plants.   I thought the bags were for helping the big garden next to them and the plant nursery.   The bags were very hard and so I didn’t realize at first that there was water in there.   Fortunately, the bags were labeled potable water.

Last things I saw at the Farmlab were The Twain Tour Bus and metro bus.   I wondered why the two buses were there.   I saw on the internet that Metabolic Studio teamed up with L.A. Creek Freak for a new installment of The Twain Tour Bus and showcased a dozen of Los Angeles’ iconic historic downtown bridges.  When I came there, I saw The Twain Tour Bus parked in the Farmlab and it didn’t run.  I saw the Metro Bus without its wheels and it was parked there too.  

Overall, this was my first visit to Farmlab.   After I went there, I hoped one day to go back there if I have time.  Farmlab had many things that I had never seen before.  I liked it.  It is free and you can go anytime you want.

James Turrell

James Turrell is an artist primarily concerned with light and space. He was born on May 6, 1943 in Pasadena, California. Turrell was a MacArthur fellow in 1984.  He was represented by the Pace Gallery in New York City.   Turrell received a pilot’s license when he was 16 years old. He studied psychology and mathematics and got a BA in psychology at Pomona College in 1965 and later, he pursued art.   He received a Masters of Fine Arts from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California in 1966.  Turrell’s work explores light and space that speaks to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body, and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening. 

Turrell’s Roden Crater links heaven to earth, there by connecting the actions of people with the movements of planets and galaxies. His fascination with the phenomena of light reflects his personal, inward search for mankind’s place in the universe.  Turrell’s art encourages greater self-awareness by a thoughtful practice of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. His ethereal installations enlist light to communicate feelings of transcendence and the Divine.  Roden Crater is best known as a work in progress.  Turrell is turning this natural cinder volcanic crater into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed specifically for the viewing of celestial phenomena.

His other works usually enclose the viewer in order to control their perception of light.  A James Turrell Skyspace is an enclosed room large enough for roughly 15 people.  Inside, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof.  In this work he is controlling the viewers’ perception. 

He is also known for his light tunnels and light projections that create shapes that seem to have mass and weight, though they are created with only light.   Turrell designed the Live Oak Meeting House for the Society of Friends, with an opening or skyhole in the roof, so that light takes on a decidedly religious connotation as God coming down from above.

            James Turrell opened The James Turrell Museum at the Bodega Colomé in the Province of Salta, in Argentina in April 2009.   It was designed by Turrell after Donald Hess, the owner of the Bodega and owner of a few of Turell's works, told him he wanted to dedicate a museum to his work.  It contains nine light installations, including a skyspace (Unseen Blue) and some drawings and prints.  His work Acton is a very popular exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  Turrell creates an optical illusion in which the viewer in the beginning sees the opening as a flat, monochromatic surface. Prolonged viewing leads to a surprising shift in perception, as the viewer may see and even reach into the sensing space.

In October 2009, the “Wolfsburg Project,” Turrell’s largest exhibition in Germany to date, opened and continued through to October 2010. Among the works featured in the Wolfsburg Project is Ganzfeld or Spread, a series of light installations that cover 70 square meters in area and 12 meters in height.  When you enter Spread, a long room filled with blue neon and fluorescent light, it's like stepping through a screen, allowing you to pass from one dimension into another.  The room, it turns out, is much longer than it seems--Spread is what's known as a Ganzfeld, or a field of light that flattens depth, removing all the usual orientational cues that humans depend on.  Toward the back of the room the light turns into something gaseous, almost approaching solidit.  But your own eyes have created this situation.

            For me I thought his Ganzfeld work looks like 3-D.   It is bright and colorful and makes a person feel insignificant in the light of the heavens and the vastness of the universe.  Roden Crater reminds me of a huge eyes ranging across the skies, seeing all like God would.

Marcel Duchamp

         Using the Mona Lisa to mediate between high and low culture is not new. Soon after the turn of the 20th century, the Dada movement revolted against the "high cultural" content of the visual arts. In doing this, the Dadaists elevated the mundane into the world of the "aesthetic" by forcing observers to look at everyday objects in surprisingly new contexts.

        With this piece, Marcel Duchamp took a cheap postcard-sized reproduction of the Mona Lisa upon which in 1919 the artist drew a mustache and a thin goatee beard. On one hand L.H.O.O.Q. must be understood as one of Duchamp's "readymade" works of art -- works that he didn't make, but which, by having been placed intellectually within a conceptual framework of "Art," I think he forces the observer to see ordinary objects from new perspectives.

Burning Man

          
       This piece, called Big Rig Jig by Mike Ross, was constructed from two discarded tanker trucks and displayed at Burning Man, an art festival in the Nevada Desert, in 2007. The structure not only towers 42 feet in the air, but is also designed to allow a person to enter through the cab and climb through the tankers to emerge on a platform at the top. An incredible feat of art, engineering, and playground technology rolled into one.

         
     Big Rig Jig by Mike Ross was intended to show the creative spirit of truck drivers. As pervasive as 18-wheelers and delivery trucks are in our way of life, I rarely get to see them transformed into art pieces. I enjoyed some of the ways artists are transforming the backbone of America to make it more beautiful, or at least more interesting.

Improv Everywhere

          
          Earlier this year, the 10th Annual "No Pants Subway Ride" took place in NEW YORK CITY. The event was organized by "Improv Everywhere."  Hundreds of participants took different subway lines and then took off their pants inside the subway car, with the simple aim of making their fellow subway riders laugh. The idea to me is still very ridiculous and I still have NO IDEA what the point of this project is besides making people laugh.

          I think some subway riders were amused by the sight of people without pants in the freezing winter weather but others, like myself, think the idea is silly or even disgusting. From the picture, it looks like Improv Everywhere caused scenes of chaos and confusion in public places.

Donatella Versace

          Versace's couture cloths have been identified with celebrities and music for decades now. But, at the same time, her style is so dramatic it can overwhelm the clothes themselves. This dress is part the collection summarizing all the elements of the Versace vision: the feminine, maybe even the ultra feminine, and the trailing, torso-cinching, bosom displaying dress created in shades of aqua, pale yellow, ice blue, powder green, quartz pink, or gold.

         This particular light-as-air couture dress is somewhat interesting. The strength of this design is its lightness, in my opinion. This dress seems to have no weight.  It is both over the top and flowy, but somehow it works. The style itself seems to come directly out of the 1980's, so I'm not sure that it would be popular today.  It is said that Donatella reserves her couture dresses for her clients.  I wonder if they would like this style today?

Maya Lin

         Maya Lin is an American Artist who is know for her work in sculpture and landscape art.  She is the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.  This piece of artwork is called "Storm King Wavefield."  This is her new earthwork project.  This is a landscape art.  This installation is an excellent of representation of nature, land that looks like moving water.  When I see this piece of art, it made me feel relaxed.  There are many hills and trees.  The colors of this art are greens, blues, and oranges reflecting the colors of water and storm. This piece reminds me of and brings me back to my Vietnam.

        The 11-acre installation, which will open to the public next spring, consists of seven rows of undulating hills huddled in a inclining valley.  The hills look like ocean waves.  The artist wants to explain how the waves begin and end.  She is working with land instead of with water.  I like this piece of art because it looks so beautiful and it is amazing how she combines trees and hills that were formed from the action of real waves long ago into this art.

Masaki Fujihata

             This piece of  artwork of the Japanese media artist gives the impression of being lost in a digital world, rather than of being lost in a dream. Morel’s Panorama, which sees real time images of the viewer integrated with images of the artist, stretched and filtered through a strange cylindrical shape, was more intriguing.

           There's something confusing and alien about the work of the artist, Masaki Fujihata. And though it certainly has a very surreal Japanese aesthetic – with its playful take on technology that sees avatars chatting nonsense to each other – there is also something slightly subversive and almost Dada about it. But though this artwork is very intriguing and impressive, the cool, detached quality of a world dominated by technology seems far from perfect.

Harold Cohen / Aaron

                  Harold Cohen is regarded as being one of the first pioneers of computer generated paintings and Aaron is the first robot in human history to paint original art. Aaron mixes its own paints, creates artwork and washes its own brushes.

                Cohen's work is very abstract, particularly with this piece. It grew out of investigations about the nature of representation or how and why we see marks on paper. The choice of colors is absolutely beautiful.

Vaneeesa Blaylock

                Sometimes SL events are like watching paint dry. Wait for things to rez. More people arrive. More waiting for them to rez. There's the lag, there's the series of comments and asides that scroll across the screen, and the "we want the show" feeling.
              

               On Saturday afternoon,  Vaneeesa Blaylock and 26 young ladies performed Miss Blaylock's VB03 - Veinticinco Mujeres, in the gazebo of Oxbridge Village. The idea seemed to be that larger women - described as "beautiful, Rubenesque women" are "as refreshing as they are powerful and graceful," in Miss Blaylock's words on  her Journal. Fair enough, most women in SL are impossibly skinny.  These women were in Oxbridge Village to celebrate the diverse body types of women by showing up wearing nothing but a pair of shoes. Two small problems and one big problem: first, not everyone got the memo and wore bikinis, lingerie, or accessories. No big deal, as we all got the message.  Second, the "performance" seemed to involve the ladies just standing there. For more than a half-hour.  These avatars are second life representations of real people but they tend to all look alike. I thought she wanted to represent different shapes of the female body but these avatars all look alike, big breasts, skinny bodies, long legs, thereby, defeating her stated purpose.  If Ms. Blaylock is trying to represent many form of the female body, her technical efforts have failed.  Personally, I thought her work was ugly because of all these  naked women and I didn't understand what was meant.

ART VIDEO PROJECT

         On Thursday, April 11, 2011, my classmate, Dee and I, went to Huntington Beach to do the art video project.  It was very exciting to do this project.  We spent about two hours  finishing this project.  We recorded the colors of the ocean, seagulls, sand, etc.   My classmate recorded this video.  I presented on this video.  We hope you enjoy our video.
       
        I thought the colors of sand were just browns, but as I looked deeply, I found the colors of sand to be very different and of many colors and brightness.  When I first saw the water as the beach, I saw the blue colors.  As I came closer, I found the colors of water are also brown, green, and gray.  I felt relaxed when I heard the sound of waves coming and going on the sand and smelled the salt in the air and tasted it in my mouth.

Joseph DeLappe

              
              Joseph DeLappe is a media artist, activist, educator and cycling fanatic and gamer.  Joseph DeLappe was first really known for his game activism. Gandhi’s March to Dandi was a recreation in Second Life of Gandhi’s 1930 march in protest of the British salt tax. For 24 days, DeLappe used a Nordic Trak Walkfit to walk the 248-mile length of Gandhi’s original march for 6 hours a days. His SL names are Joseph Grommet and MGandhi Chakrobarti.  His steps were converted  to his avatar, MGandhi Chakrabati, so he walked where his avatar walked.  DeLappe chose the Gandhi character because he symbolizes strong, non-violent leadership. 


                MGandhi’s progress through SL was projected on a wall facing DeLappe. While on his march in SL, DeLappe was finding users to come along, giving them a digital gift explaining the project, and inviting them to walk with him. He refused to fly MGandhi unless he got stuck, and he teleported only occasionally. These limitations were a way of honoring Gandhi’s legendary trek but also resulted in interesting readings of the digital realm. DeLappe often bumped into “private zones” that took time to walk around. MGandhi would run into players, who accepted his gifts, engaged with him in a brief IM exchange, and also watched as DeLappe walked the avatar away. This played out in the Eyebeam gallery as well. During DeLappe’s frequent breaks to eat, rest, or handle technical issues, a few people walked up to the Nordic Trak and hopped on.   I thought his work was excellent.  He combined the MGandhi's project to his walking steps.  He did this because he wanted to say something instead of just talking as a real person.  DeLappe was making gaming an art form.  Eventhough I thought this idea inventive and creative, this particular art form does not appeal to me.  I thought he used Gandhi because Gandhi was a leader of India and political hero.  DeLappe used him because he wanted to let people feel something about being a leader when they played his games.

Robert Rauschenberg

           

           Rauschenberg is well-known for his "combines" of the 1950's.  This is one of his combine works.  This is a very interesting piece. To be honest, I really have no idea what I'm looking at. This artwork is really confusing. This is more like a collage of snapshots as used in  advertising photography. The artist incorporated all these photographs into his work.

           

          As I did my research on the artist and his works, I found out that many of these photographs had been reduced by multiple reproduction to the status of a commodity. The artist incorporated all these photographs as advertisements into loose, abstract compositions.   He  picked up trash or found any materials that interested him in the streets of New York City, and he brought these materials back to his studio where they could be combined into his works. Rauschenberg's art works explore the gap between art and the everyday world.  In particular his series of works which he called Combines served as instances in which the boundaries between art and sculpture were broken down so that both were present in a single work of art.  I like his work.  His art work interests me. I think his work is popular because I see a lot of people who combine various materials or mediums to make cards to send to people they love.  I also enjoy how he incorporates bright colors into his works, making them very attractive to me.

Mariko Mori

             I think this piece is very interesting. This sculpture has a very religious feel to it. I think this sculpture is a fusion of art, technology, religion (Buddhism) and the idea of universal spiritual consciousness. This piece of sculpture is symbolic of oneness and unity in the world, and the artist, Mori uses cutting edge technology and material to create a strikingly beautiful vision for a better future.

            This sculpture represents the disappearance of boundaries between the self and others. It can be interpret as a symbol of the acceptance of otherness and a model for overcoming national and cultural borders. Furthermore, this sculpture represents the world existing as one interconnected organism.  I think this work also represents a Buddha eye that sees everybody in the world and creates a feeling of unity.  The stair represents opportunity to enter into this oneness with the Buddha.

Comet Morigi

         Comet Morigi's house is an artwork itself. The artwork depicts a clean, intimate, and welcoming atmosphere. There is not much clutter from what is shown and the lighting in her house is very subtle and dim.  The couches are a simple silver and hold no overcomplicated design. In the picture depicted to the left, you can see two of her works hanging off her very own house wall.  This makes me wonder if she's extremely proud of her work.

         In my opinion, Morigi's work primarily focuses on surrealistic environmental creations. The two hanging artworks in her living room are dominant in this art work. In the painting on the right, facing the artist, she created an interesting lightshow-esque cylinder building . I think her light themed buildings always use pink and white as the primary colors.  The orange cloud represents windy, foggy forest and the pink and white particle wind represents the wind circle that surrounds the main pavilion. I think her work represents her in second life or virtual reality.  In this picture, she shows us how she and her friend relax in her collector avatar house.  In this artist's creations, a person doesn't just get to see them, a person gets to participate in them. The artist herself represents herself as her avatar, how she wants to be seen.

Matthew Barney

       I was very interested in the prosthetics the artist wore when this picture was taken. This picture/character in particular caught my attention. It's kind of scary and grotesque yet delightfully fascinating. It's kind of hard to tell if this is a human or a half animal? Perhaps, it's both?? I believe the character maintains a certain level of mystique which makes it all the more interesting.

     I think this is a great idea to take your ideas and creations out of one medium into the next.  This photograph of the artist dancing has been digitally enhanced to give it the strange scary appearance.  I think this man reminds me of an early fabulous dancer, but he also looks like a donkey.  The addition of the two opposing colors for the background creates a surrealistic feeling as well.

UCI / Beall Center for Art + Technology

On Saturday, March 26, 2011, I went to the UCI/ Beall Center for Art + Technology. I saw three large sculptures there made from inflatable materials.The three sculptures were named Bird, Inner Space, and BioMorphic. All three of the sculptures impressed me. When you stand next to them, lights turn on and highlight various aspects in a mostly darkened display room.

When I walked in there, I first saw what looked like big letter M’s hanging up. I didn’t recognize them as anything else until I stood next to them and the lights turned on. Then I could see by the reflection of the light that the M’s were actually flying birds. When the lights dimmed again, the birds returned to letter M’s. After this dramatic event, I noticed the information plaque which called them “Bird.”  Amazing!

After I saw birds, I moved on to the Inner Space sculpture.  I didn’t recognize it as anything until I read the information plaque. It looked confusing to me at first until the lights went on, then the sculpture took on the look of a NASA space station. It felt like I could go inside it and walk around.

The last piece, the BioMorphic, was part of an ongoing work exploring the forms, movements, and interaction of our human experience.  The design wasin the shape of a molecular pattern, in a geometric construction that represented the structure that underlies life.  This was a new piece that reminded me of a human form with arms and legs splayed out as though reaching for some secret robotic meaning.

Overall, I thought it was a wonderful museum project that I attended.  It was interesting to see only three pieces in this museum. Beall Center for Art + Technology didn’t look like LACMA or the Norton Simon Museum that I visited before.  This was a very small museum that is in the process of expanding.  This place seemed more like a college theatre than a museum.