Museum Post

The top artwork is called Untitled, 1990 and was created by Gilbert Lewis (b. 1945). The artwork is an intimate piece that is exposing a man’s shirtless self in the side. The artist takes different pictures of people in different stages of their life which is actually nice. You get to see the growth that a person goes through and how there facial features and appearance starts to slowly change. Most of the people that Lewis takes pictures of are males as a way for them to express themselves. The people that he painted built a kind of trust with him and confided on him enough for them to speak on how they were feeling in life. In John Berger Ways of Seeing a line that stood to me the most was “To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art, treating it as mere documentary evidence; the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist’s experience of the visible.” The artist Lewis uses his artwork to tell a story, express how the subject is feeling, and what they want others around them to see. Which is why when faces are being photographed there is a lot of vulnerability and emotion mostly behind the picture.

The bottom artwork is called Misty and Joey at Hornstrasse, Berlin, 1992 and was created by Nan Goldin. The photo shows a man dressed in drag and women in the background looking disgusted by what she is seeing. In the period that this was created, society was not so open with seeing people dressing like the opposite sex. I noticed that the image had the spotlight focused on the person that is dressed up. The object being photographed is wearing a black dress with sheer glitter shirt, blue wig, pearl gloves, and crystal jewelry. One passage from Joanne Finkelstein that connected to this is “She was completely dismissive of her sex organs and regarded her penis as ‘anaesthetized’.” Agnes was not letting the fact that she had different sexual organs change the way she felt in her own body. Just like the subject in the canvas is comfortable enough in her body to be dressed the way she is. The theme is identity and nonconformity, and, in this artwork, you can see how the subject is starting to finally find herself and is presenting herself to the world and the way they feel comfortable. It is a look into their life of partying, having a good time, discovering themselves, and making friendships. 

This artwork was created by Alec Soth’s 1969 and is called Lennu, Minneapolis 2002. The theme is identity and nonconfromity. A shirtless man in just a pair of briefs is seen sitting in what looks like a table. The table has spices, flower, house keys hung up, and seems like the background has family pictures. The subject being photographed seems to be living alone with his dog laying right besides his legs. This picture seems to capture the life of a single man that is living alone in the United States. The everyday life of a regular person, the picture is almost animated like it can be part of a movie the way that it was edited. In Finklestien “Manners compel us to think about situations and to imagine the other’s point of view.” Many people that look at this picture would be judging it before even giving it a second thought. But us as humans having manners makes us less judgmental to what we see in the picture. We go in dept with what is going on in the picture and try to figure out the meaning of it instead of just judging the shirtless man that we are looking at. Which is why it is important to have manners and act on them in our everyday life.

This painting is by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b.1940) and is called Salah, Cree and Shonhone What is an American? 2003. The artist is expressing her Native American heritage throughout this piece. A woman that is being portrayed is dressed in traditional clothing with cultural necklaces around her neck. One thing I noticed about this painting is that the ladies face is not being shown and is kind of cropped from the canvas. These patterns that look like tribal prints are behind the women. The piece looks like it was sketched with a pencil which I haven’t seen much pieces that look like this. The words what is an American is asking us what we think an Americans looks like which is pretty clever. When we think about what an American look like we always picture a white blonde person that has blue eyes and is dressed in clothing that is jeans and a shirt. While this canvas is showing us a person of obvious Native American heritage it wants us to think about what we the think someone from America is like. I noticed how everything is grey and the only colorful thing is the ribbon in her hand. The colors that are held out are red, white, and blue which happen to be the color of the American flag. The woman is claiming this is her right identity and no one can take it away from her. No matter how she looks or dresses it doesn’t matter because that does not make her any less than people portray Native Americans.

The first artwork is created by Konrad Cramer (1856-1963), it is called Portrait of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, ca. 1935. You can see a middle-aged Asian man, staring to the side with a half-smile on. It is labeled as artistic identity. The middle-aged man seems like he is thinking hard about something that is going on in his life. I like how the artistic captured an everyday person just staring into space and just looks so natural. In John Berger Ways of Seeing I found this one quote that related to this artwork which was “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent.” Photographs are used to remember things that we want to have memories of and take with us as we grow old. We look back at pictures and remember the day we took that and start to reminisce what we did that day and all the memories that were gathered at that time. That is the beauty of taking pictures and when I first saw this artwork, I thought about how much pictures are my source of keeping my memories alive. I want to continue taking pictures and building up more memories as I am going on with my life. Photography is a way I express myself and how I feel, and I love taking pictures when I am outside.

"A Precious Story" : FINAL By Mariah Torres

Quote: “One has to live a life always at an angle… to be oneself and at the same time another… nothing, absolutely nothing, as it seems.” -John Banville, The Untouchable, (Finklestein, Joanne; Pg 121) For my final project, I have created a ceramic vase and painted various symbols around it. The subject of my project is to show my grandfather’s story in Puerto Rico because he was one of the few very important people in my life. The contents on the vase shows the Puerto Rican flag being surrounded by pineapples. Pineapples were highly favored by the people in Puerto Rico, so he made a good profit off of them. My grandfather was a farmer and owned several crops. He loved working and kept up with his farm. On the top of the vase around the neck, fish are carved; My grandfather was a fisherman as well. Fish are plentiful around Puerto Rico, so he helped fish for the people as well. In the back of the vase is a silhouette of horses going up a mountain. My grandfather used to own several horses of his own. He caught them wild and tamed them. I made this choice to make this composition because I was inspired by Susanna Esposito. She is a ceramic artist that makes statement pieces and ceramic pieces. She isn’t hesitant about showing her heritage on her work, which reminds me of my grandfather. He was proud of where he came from. So, I wanted to take my project a step further and create a statement piece for my family. The process to make this vase was timely. The method I used to make the form was the coiling method, which I had to roll several pieces of clay into long rolled strips and then stack them on top of one another. I then smoothed out the stacked clay to secure its form. I used a paddle to lightly beat the bumps down a bit to get a smoother surface for carving my designs. After bisque firing, I used different colors of underglaze and painted the designs on it. I let the paint dry before glazing the piece and set it for the last firing. The differences to this self-portrait and my midterm self-portrait are I chose to not focus the project on an important moment in my life. Instead, I focused on the person that taught my parents and I to be compassionate about people and life. I also did not want to make another collage again, I wanted to make a sculpture to test my other creative skills. (This semester, I’ve done ceramics class, I’m not a pro at it. I’ll keep practicing!). My piece is traditional and speaks for the Puerto Rican culture. Culture exists in the spectacle because it is one of the many important things that define us in our society. Culture classifies us in different social groups. Art pieces that carry certain styles, achievements, and archives that belong in a certain group carry a lot of meaning.

My House in Dominican Republic

 Frida's Casa Azul 

Tom Nussbaum's Family Totem 
My Home in Dominican Republic

My final project is based on my house in the Dominican Republic. My project reminds me of being united with a majority of my family members, but can also give me a feeling of separation because of the fact that we will not be seeing them for a few years. I came to the Dominican Republic very often with my parents to visit old friends and family. I chose this idea for the project because this house is a part of my childhood. My brothers, cousins, and I have played many games, including video games, together. We would play hide and seek, baseball (mostly practice hitting a ball with a baseball bat), basketball, and tag. With many family members, activities are very fun. I would categorize my work as a sculptor and worked on this project with my parents. I used cardboard to build the walls and cement type of glue(very strong glue) to prevent the house from falling. This symbolizes the renovation of our house. The building of the house and the change of house color are all components of renovating a house. The walls were colored with color pencils and markers. I compared my work with Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul and Tom Nussbaum’s Family Totem. The Family Totem shows us that each member of the family supports one another, and they have each other’s back. The images above prove this point by working together as team. I compared my work to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul based on the fact that her art piece reminds her of her home and has now become a museum today. The museum even has many of her possessions and artwork to remember Frida. This project will cause the audience to think about their past. The audience will notice that this project is about identity and based on past memories. Overall, the project is trying to show the audience that our past memories remind us about identity. There are people who have had good experiences in their childhood in other countries. My midterm project is completely different from my final because it was based on me as a gamer, as a character of a game and presents issues that games have today. For example, many games today have microtransactions or DLCs that prevent you from exploring a new world or getting stronger. Although, they are similar based on my identity. The midterm represents me as a gamer, reminds me of my childhood and of times when games did not require microtransactions. My final also reminds me of my childhood when my family and I have visited the Dominican Republic and have done many fun activities with a majority of our family members. I wanted to make my project different because I believe the house in the Dominican Republic is a part of who I am, and I wanted to share my experiences with others.

Media is a good venue for self-presentation since you can easily communicate your own image to others. Media platforms have a growing importance in our lives since they are the places where we “showcase” our living experiences. They also reflect a variety of dimensions regarding our position in the virtual and physical social life. The spectacle means the mass media, where the glaring begins and causes the spectacle. According to Debord, "the spectacle can be found on every screen that you look at." It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances. My project exists in the spectacle because many people have grown up and visited their countries during childhood. This means that people can share the same experience. When others can relate to your work, the spectacle begins.

Quotes

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves (Berger, 9).

Each image looks directly out to the reader. The background is plain and undistracting, there is no trick lighting. (Finkelstein, 122).

“Like all languages advertising is polysemic, it can express multiple levels and registers of meaning (Finkelstein, 151).”

References

Berger, J. (n.d.). Ways of Seeing. United Kingdom: British Broadcasting Corporation & Penguin.

Finkelstein, J. (2007). The Art of Self Invention Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture. New York; London, United States of America: I.B.Taurus & Co Ltd.

selfie inspired by mutu

For my weekly selfie I decided to use the picture of the movie “American Psycho” and the book of my choice is “Mr.Mercedes” by Stephen King. This book is about a retired detective that gets a case about a killing that occurred during a job fair. In which a man ran over a crowd of people with a stolen Mercedes. This particular case is assigned to him because the killer then addresses the detective with a letter. As the detective tries to figure out who it is, the story tells the type of life the killer has. This book was one of the many that catch my attention because I’m a fan of psychological thrillers. It is why I decided to study the brain in a biological and psychological aspect. Especially because of my interest about mental conditions. My main motive for this is experiences I’ve lived in which I’ve interacted with similar people and see how normal they can be and how society makes them outcasts and sometimes even shames them for something that’s not their fault.

Mutu Selfie

       Wangechi Mutu strongly incorporates creatures in nature with humanoid forms. The body language of these creatures demonstrates their way of being. Through these characteristics you could see different behaviors that show love, hate, despair, or praise to the living nature around. The creatures that really got to me that relate to the novel are the ones that are alone and show little emotion. You can’t see their faces but you get a feeling that a few these creatures are really upset, almost mourning. One doesn’t know what happened all you know is that something is wrong. 

The novel I read is called 13 reasons why. It’s about a girl who record herself on the reasons why she killed herself. Everyone around her does something to her but still think that she seems fine. But she feels condemned for just trying to understand how to be a a teenager.

The image self portrait I made has a creature of innocent beauty and falls apart slowly in a lonely place in space. That loneliness of the girl is present in a living creature that so beautiful that it shouldn’t ever be expressing sadness

Selfie inspired by Wangechi Mutu

A novel that has deeply influenced me in different ways is “Cuba sólo para turistas”. I was able to connect to the main character and her perspective. She was born in Cuba and at a very young age she came with her mother to the U.S. and I went through the same when I was 12 years old. In the story, she goes back home to visit her family (the family members that did not left Cuba with her), a large number of events occurred during this visit. The main character suffered a series of emotions when she gets to the island and reunites with her father, sister, and meets her nephews for the first time. I learned more about the reality about Cuba, specially the one that I did not lived. This book allowed me to question everything I had learned in the history books as a kid. Stories are very important and it is more important to learn the different sides of a story.The image contains the book cover, the ocean, and pictures of myself. I did this in order to represent how the main character finds a part of herself which she had no idea existed before going back home. It includes the cuban flan and the Hotel Nacional which is located in Havana, most of the events in this novel take place in the capital. I became aware and started to notice how cubans and tourists experience Cuba in completely different ways. Overall this is a novel that made me think about prostitution, friendship, communism, homosexuality, family, politics, spirituality/religion, sexuality and love.