A few weeks ago,  Maggie Walker art classes had the amazing oppurunity to explore some of D.C's art scene, going from the National Gallery to the Freer and Sackler, and ending the day at the Hirshorn.

This year I think I enjoyed the National Gallery more than I ever had. A freshman-year Jordan would easily say that her favorite museum was the Hirshorn, because of cool light installations and  interactive pieces, but this year I really appreciated the sheer scale of the National Gallery, which hosts everything from the famous portraits of George Washington to the works of John Baldessari. It's impossible to become bored because each room can be so strikingly different from the next. 

In addition to the "Danny Devito Jesus" painting alluded to by an extroverted security guard, my favorite pieces in the National Gallery  were a couple of landscapes by Paul Cezzane, an exhbit of the works of Thomas Cole, and sculture of the figure "justice". Sketeces of many of these are included in my sketchbook entry. 

Going into the Freer and Sacklr, we were asked to explore the Islamic art section. Out of all the works I particularly liked the collection of plates, whose composition was meant to evoke mortals "striving for the divine." Admittingly my favorite part of these galleries was not the Islamic art section, but the Filthy Lucre Exhibit, a re imagining of the peacock room.  In my English classes, for my Personal Anthology, I have been collecting texts that are re imaginings or reworkings of classic stories. I love that someone is creating art in that same vein. 

Our next and final stop was the Hirshorn. Though our group spent the majority of our time in the Surrealist Sculpture exhibit, my favorite piece was the 6 part stop motion exorcism stop motion animation movie by Sergio Caballero (a better explanation provided here: http://hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/baby-kamp/#detail=/bio/sergio-caballero/). As bizarre as it was, I hate to admit that I can’t stop thinking about it.

This is not to say I didn't also enjoy the non-objective paintings we were asked to look at:

This one in particualr,
​ Robert Irwin
Bed of Roses, 1962

made me think of the "zip" paintings by Barnett Newman.

I would be lying, however, if I didn't admit that meeting this little bud was my absolute. favorite part of the day.

This is an older article but it was recently shared with me, and I decided to look at it for one of my awareness posts this quarter.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/02/giant-inflatable-balloons-transform-interior-spaces-into-otherwordly-environments/

"Barcelona-based Penique Productions is an artist collective founded in 2007 that creates transformative installations in public spaces. To do this the group utilizes massive plastic balloons that are inflated inside buildings and other interior areas. Coupled with exterior lighting that illuminates the colored plastic, the results can be beautifully dramatic, making the new environment almost unrecognizable from the actual space."

From the moment I saw the images I felt hooked, and it took me a while to figure out exactly why. I came to the conclusion that the reason I enjoy it so much is that recently,  I have become more and more interested in art that is immersive. I like the idea of art that completely transforms or creates a new space for its viewer. Art that literally surrounds. I am reminded of pieces of art that were themselves, a room, a space, at places like the Anderson Gallery or the Whitney when we visited New York.  Also, even before reading this article, I had not only been thinking of immersive art spaces in the physical world, I had been exploring what it would take to create immersive art for platforms like Google Cardboard that essentially can transport you into a "virtual reality". I would like to explore this all further. 

Artist Statement
My work plays with the architecture of nature and organic growth. By identifying patterns and motifs that occur in the natural world in different contexts and at different scales, both macroscopic and microscopic, I have developed a formal, aesthetic vocabulary that I use to construct hybrid sculptural forms, half real, half surreal.

​http://roganbrown.com/home.html
​

I first saw Brown's work the other day while browsing through Colossal, and I immediateatley loved it. I've always thought that three dimensional work that is created by putting together lots of little pieces is incredibly cool (and reminds me of the work of one of the spotlight artists we looked at last year in Digart). I loved that this work which is very \strategically put together is inspired by wild, uncontrollable, and naturally occurring elements: "tree moss, cell structures, bacteria, coral, diatoms, and radiolaria".

As much as a loved the work, I also really love the way that the artist himself spoke  about it. Not only is his work incredibly aesthetically pleasing; he believes that "art can play an important role in humanizing scientific practice" and that work like his own can make " it more accessible, especially in a field as fraught and emotive as  infectious disease." In that same vein,his work has been featured in publications like the Emerging Infectious Diseases magazine, a publication from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.He also speaks to the trend of artists such of himself returning to "simpler materials and craft", in his case paper, in response to an age very much dominated by digital media. 

I will be keeping track of this artist and hope to draw inspiration from his work in the future.