Whiteread's Memories

Rachel Whiteread | Gagosian

I still have a lot of uncertainty with Rachel Whiteread's art. Some pieces I absolutely love for their odd aesthetic and impenetrability, but some are just so aloof that I don't know where to go with them. I am especially frustrated because as far as I know she hasn't developed her style since the 1990's. While her early work is really exciting because of how it captures emptiness and relates to memory, her later stuff just feels pretty repetitive and uninspired. I hope we get to see some more stuff from her in the future that is more provocative. That being said, I really love her work and would love to see her pieces in person, I feel like in a gallery/museum setting they would be really imposing and off-putting, and people would get more out of them.

I think her work also provokes a lot of thought between what is sculpture and what is installation. I think most people would regard her work as sculpture, I probably would to for most of her work. But there is a relation to the body in pieces like Ghost that really make you want to look at it from every angle and find some way inside, it is so closed off you want to force your way in to figure it out more. I think that is what helps make some of her pieces installation. As well as the mode of 'heightened perception' that we talked about today, since the sculpture occupies emptiness, it makes you think about your relation to the room you are in, or could provoke claustrophobia by thinking of your space being cast in plaster/concrete/etc.

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My Flickr Findings

My Flickr Blume No. 2 "Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?" (Bob Dylan, 1965) I just took this quote on a very literal level instead of its total meaning. I like the idea of something that is happening that is under everyones radar, so that's what I tried to do with the abstraction in the photos. I like making people see things in a way that they can't with their naked eye. I took all these photos on a walk in the evening this past weekend. I focused mostly on making more abstract pictures because that is what I generally like to do in my art. To support that I manipulated them quite a bit in photoshop. I had a lot of fun in messing in the 'Curves' menu, I found that was a really good way to mess with them (especially in black and white). Overall I think that most of my photos are successful, about 16 of them I'm happy with. There were some I included to just reach the 20 photos. I am intere

Picnic Projections

I really loved making our installation piece. The freedom we had to do whatever was so liberating. I was so impressed with how we had a bunch of different themes emerge from all the random stuff we brought, and how the piece felt pretty cohesive overall. The piece to me has a feeling of a picnic gone wrong. The front half especially is full of such vibrant colors and flowers, feeling inviting at first glance. Then as you look at it longer and read the writing on the walls, it feels a little more ominous. The back on the other hand takes this aggression further, with the book on the wall yelling at you along with all the 'Not for Sale" signs. It felt very current to make something that also seemed to be commenting on the environment. All the greens in the room and the flowers coming out of the trash definitely added to that, along with the fact that the possible consumerism of our 'store' was aborted by the 'Not For Sale' signs. I think it would be interes

Representative Activism

Justice MMIWG, Valaria Tatera, 2019-2021 I found Valaria Tatera's talk incredibly moving and informative. I had absolutely no idea Enbridge pipeline 5 existed or that Wisconsin even had residential schools. I think growing up in Wisconsin gave me the impression that most of the injustices meted out against native peoples were in other places, it was worrying to find out the same happened here. Although sadly it's not that surprising. My complete ignorance on the topic shows just how deficient the school system is in the US, where the majority population can just choose to leave out the more unpleasant parts of history that make them look bad. This is why Tatera's art is so necessary, not only is it a healing process for herself, which would be important enough by itself, it makes people focus on what they'd rather ignore. "Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, of painting SPEECH and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taugh

Ethan's Experiments

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