Big Orbit Gallery: "Red Hearts/Black Tongues" by David Mitchell

When we first pulled up to the entrance of the Big Orbit Gallery, I wasn't even really sure where to go. We managed to find the entrance which is located at the top of some very dilapidated-looking wooden steps, across from a larger-than-life plaster cast of a woman's body. The door was blacked out except for the name of the gallery and exhibit, and at first we opened the door to nearly complete darkness. There was music playing, but nearly no light. You could see the silhouettes of two cars, and upon walking further, that there were actually screens in the cars. The screens depicted a man and a woman, in each of the two cars, and they had tears digitally streaming down their faces. It was poignant and puzzling at the same time.

I had looked up the description of the exhibition before I came, so I knew David Mitchell's proposed project was to depict crashed cars and taxidermy deer. In the darkness, I couldn't see any deer, and it was a little eerie in the space - I was just hoping that they didn't fall out of the sky at the end of the 10 minute installation loop. It turns out that we had entered in nearly two minutes into the loop, so we were out of sync with the story. Watching from the beginning, you begin to comprehend a little more, and thus when the headlights on the cars go bright and the inner car screens go dark, you know what happened. The video at the back of the space was completely eerie, but at the same time, it wasn't scary. Seeing the two human figures prone inside the darkening heart was a little unsettling, but at the same time, it was also peaceful. I liked the way the actual installation heart (a raised platform on the floor) had lights that slowly got brighter, instead of blinding you all at once.

I thought that the deer and the humans were an interesting comparison - in the end, we're all just road kill, but what matters is finding someone you love. I didn't even mind the taxidermy deer as much as I thought I would. But I did think that I liked Mitchell's sketch for the space (shown below) better than the actual installation. If you're going to use deer as a symbol for roadkill, and you want to show the tenderness between them, do something like you did in the sketch. I thought standing them up, having their obviously plasticized tongues touching simply could have been done better. In the sketch, the deer are lying down and the moment is more tender. I felt like the postures of the humans in the video and the taxidermy deer in the actual instillation didn't add up.

Still, I liked it. You just need to watch it from the beginning to comprehend what the artist wanted to convey.

The JFK Assassination and Ant Farm's "Eternal Frame"

Even though my major is in Art History, I usually concern myself with the pre-1900 world. That being said, I have never taken an American history class besides the one I took my junior year of high school, and even then we didn't get past 1980. We only brushed on the JFK assassination, since my teacher decided to focus more on the cultural impact than anything else. I had heard of "the grassy knoll" but never really knew what it referred to, and I knew there were some conspiracy theories about Lee Harvey Oswald, but I couldn't name any. The entire decade that was the 1960s was such an upheaval in history - so many significant assassinations, and so much unrest in the country. I can only wonder if the world would be different today if JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, as well as others, hadn't been assassinated within five years of each other.

I finally had the chance to look up some of the history of the JFK assassination in Dallas, and I have to agree that some things simply don't add up. While I've never been big on conspiracy theories, I feel like the entire case/autopsy/later rulings were mishandled and are thus relatively open to interpretation. There were over 15 completely separate conspiracy theories on ONE website I looked at, and I'm sure there are many more. I found that I was intrigued by them, and had to give several of them credit. You always have to wonder if the Vice President really only accepts the ticket in the hopes that maybe one day they'll be the one in the Oval Office.

Americans have always been obsessed with media, to the point where one could argue that we are completely controlled by it. I think Ant Farm's "Eternal Frame" is a good example of how people use media to relive the past. These artists wanted to be a part of this chunk of history, and they brought all of the passersby in the area along with them. People were so touched that they didn't even seem to mind that two of the women in the procession were portrayed by men in drag!

I feel like I don't know enough about the event itself to make too much of a comment on it, and because of this I'm kind of unenthusiastically looking forward to seeing either the Zapruder film or the "Eternal Frame" in class. Looking forward to it because it's a part of history that irrevocably changed our country; unenthusiastically because I am not one for enjoying a particularly violent movie. Several of the writers in our readings remarked that they were haunted by the videos, especially the "Eternal Frame" which replays the same scene over and over again, until the viewer supposedly becomes numb and accepts it, and tries to get something more out of the imagery. I feel that if I watch something violent over and over again, the picture will just be even more rooted in my subconscious than it would be otherwise - think of something you've only seen once, and probably only at a glance, and how something that brief can stick with you (and maybe haunt you) for the rest of your life.

Review of Hallwalls: Rodney Taylor and Andrew Reyes Shows

I was so glad to finally have a chance to visit Hallwalls. I had been hearing about the space for a year, but for some reason I never managed to get downtown to see it. I was curious to see how the church had been renovated to the point that it could house a contemporary art gallery, and I was not disappointed. The new architecture is immediately apparent when you pull in the driveway and see the large glass-enclosed staircase dominating the back of the church.

Walking into the first floor, you are greeted with a space that reminded me most of the Buffalo Arts Studio - one room, set up with movable walls, and holding two completely different shows in each room. What was different about this space, though, was that it seemed that the walls were intentionally set up haphazardly, so you could glance the other exhibition through gaps in the walls. We went into Rodney Taylor's gallery first, and even though his images are rather dismal, (think blood-red tree growing out of the Capitol Building that is drowning in a sea of turbulent waters) I still really liked them. Even though the trees were dead or dying, falling apart, or being burned, I still thought they held a significant amount of power. Then, you get closer and realize that there are pencil sketches on several of the drawings. They add detail, and once again, they aren't particularly reassuring, but they add to the overall auras of the works.

I particularly loved how the works were executed, by layering paint so much that it chipped away and looked like real, peeling tree bark. It also continued to convey the sense of destruction and decay at work in his paintings. These are works on paper, and are attached to the wall only via push pin, which left some of the paper puckering out from the wall. It was a nice reminder that his trees were actually created on a material that would not exist without them.

Andrew Reyes' work was mostly photography, with two mixed media pieces thrown in. The handout from the gallery says that Reyes tries to heighten the mundane, but I didn't think that his photos were mundane at all. They all paid such careful attention to detail and to composition. The photograph of a man with the cauliflower eye was humorous, while the photo of the colorful flower doused in rain was beautiful. Reyes also includes text in some of his works, such as a picture of two birds sitting in a tree, with the caption, "do me a favor dave, shoot me if i'm still working this branch in five years." There were a few photos that I wasn't attracted to, but that's to be expected. Overall I thought it was a good show, and that both artists had something to offer me as a viewer.