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.