The walking tour of the Chelsea galleries was a rather enjoyable experience. The galleries that stood out to me the most were Kim Dorland’s and the X-rated gallery.
Kim Dorland’s work was like none I had ever seen. He made his paint stick out in his monster paintings to make the monsters pop out as well as look repulsive with the shape of the paint thickness. The giant moose head with all the graffiti and pollution was meaningfull in that it showed how the mess we leave as human beings is affecting the animals in their natural habitats. Although I have never seen a moose with that mind of mess on its head, the head symbolizes what kind of mess we are causing. What I found really impressive was that for one of his paintings, thousands of dollars were spent on the amount of paint used. It shows how seriously the artist takes his work to get across the feel and message. I found the cabin painting to be my most favorite of the gallery because Dorland used actual pieces of wood to stick out and make it look like a real cabin. Once again he incorporated the theme of pollution to leave a powerful message. The graffiti saying “Keep the Fuck Out” left a lasting impression but more interestingly, there was a small window on the piece of wood sticking out. I looked in and saw an image of a naked woman which I thought was pretty funny and clever.
The X-rated gallery was a nice way of entertaining us after seeing so many abstract and serious paintings. In addition to the sexual content, I found some of the paintings to be quite humorous such as the paintings with women with insane amounts of hair. There was also a painting where a woman was holding what I think was a hammer to her genitalia which was surprising but in a funny way. Another painting that had me thinking was one where a woman had a bug on her buttock and I was debating whether or not it was a tattoo or a real bug. On the topic of tattoos, I also found it humorous that some of the men in the highly sexual paintings had tattoos like “mother” with an anchor right next to it on their arms.
I did not find the other galleries as amusing, such as Nicky Nodjoumi’s. We learned that Nodjoumi was highly involved in politics and that he was from Iran. However, I could not understand a singleone of his paintings even with that bckground information on him. Many of the people in his paintings were composed of parts that were uneven, almost sliding off of each other. I did not know what to make of that, nor the animals that were in his paintings. The animals most likely represented political figures that he was making fun of or criticizing.
Overall, I enjoyed the galleries and the different things they had to offer. There was an interesting variety of paintings from artist to artist and it was fun seeing all these paintings.
