An Array of Illustrations, Only a Short Walk Away
The Visual Arts Museum is a haven for a wide range of artistic styles. Known by many as the SVA Gallery, the museum features art that blurs the boundaries between professional and student art work. Most of the time in the museum, you don’t notice the different. Like many visual art venues like itself, the SVA Gallery displays art work in glossy black frames on bare white walls.
When I entered the museum, the first image that caught my eye was on the left, a photograph from Hua Bai’s collection entitled “Observable Imagination.” The photo was of an old man looking over a small bridge that is surrounded by trees.
The artist of this piece makes the man both the observed and the observer; we are observing him but at the same time, he is observing the trees. I was also draw to this photograph because of its peaceful quality. We all wonder what our lives will be like when we grow old and gray and this photograph promptly reassures us that aging doesn’t have to be gray—it can be scenic and spontaneous. The man in the picture has his back turned to the camera, but one can only imagine him being happy on such as calm early-spring day. The man in the picture invokes my memory of the movie “UP” but most importantly, time that I spent with my Grandpa.
Looking at all the photographs in the gallery made me think a lot about our daily photo assignment. I remember that during that assignment, I didn’t take many pictures of the busy streets because I feared it would for one, violate people’s privacy, and two come out without a singular focus in the picture. In Bojune Kwon’s collection “The Neurosis in the City,” human figures are illustrated in overcrowded places. Despite my concerns of overcrowded-ness and lack of a singular focus point in my pictures, Kwon does a great job in turning human figures into a form that is both concrete and abstract. In Kwon’s work, the blurring effect provides both a sense of movement and anonymity.
On one hand, the picture can make you feel extremely insignificant compared to the thousands of people that walk around the city every day. On the other hand, these pictures how us that there’s so many experiences occurring every day in New York City. It makes me think about how everyone in these pictures has some story or another and how everyone has a different purpose for why they might be at a certain place at a certain time. Some people might be walking to reach an event, others going to schools and other still going to work. The first picture of this set is my favorite because it shows us the wide range of colors in the fashion and apparel of people in the city. Each of the four pictures tackles a location that we’re familiar with: from the subway, to a bridge, to Times Square, these photographs are easily relatable.
The third collection of works that grabbed my attention was Julie Saad’s rewinding. I’ve seen blue birds as motifs in art in the past so I quickly turned my attention to Saad’s collection “Rewinding.” Her photograph features people in an “urban environment” whose homes have been invaded by bright and exotic flora and fauna. At first I looked at one of these photographs because of its alluring bright-blue color but then it made in imagine what it would be like if this happened in the city.
For one, I’d guess that people wouldn’t be as calm as they are in these pictures. If I saw blue birds fly into my house I might be astounded aesthetic qualities of the birds but I would more than likely be afraid. I’m intrigued that the people in these photographs are responding to just a dramatic change in the environment in such a calm and collected way. I enjoyed that the artist of these photographs was able to blend a domestic environment with that of nature—as if to say that it’s possible for humans and nature to live together harmoniously. Or maybe, the artist is illustrating what it’d be like if plants and animals invaded out homes like humans have invaded theirs.
The fourth collection I saw was an assortment of Rorschach ink blots. I did not record the name of the artist but was nonetheless intrigued by his or her work. I went to the museum with a couple of my friends of I liked to compare our interpretations of the deliberately abstract photos. The first photo on the top left, my friend pointed out, is supposed to be a “slender man” but also has a face in its background. When I saw this same photograph, I didn’t see simply a man but rather a man’s shadow or an upside-down bell. The neck of the man and the head’s proportions seemed to be unlike a typical human figure to me. The second photo (the top right corner) was a mystery to all of us. To me, it looked like an ashtray or some sort of flower.
I realize that the two things I saw are polar opposites and that what I believe makes abstract art and ink-blots so fun. The bottom left picture appeared to be a curled up lizard or some sort of X-ray scan to me. The people around me argued it was a picture of a human skull and that the kidney shaped figure was a person’s nose. The last one on the bottom right looks like some sort of flame or flag: I see it as something that bends with the wind, perhaps a fabric of sorts. Another interesting observation to note is that the ink blots look very different when you scale them down to the size of a page: for example, the “slender-man” in the first photo had a very textile like and rugged texture to it, which it what made me suspect that it was a shadow of a man or not even a person at all.
The SVA Gallery was a very enjoyable experience because showed a wide range of photography. I went in thinking that there would be paintings and sculptures but it was a pleasant surprise to find a range of very human photographs. Other works in the exhibit included a collection of an elderly man with his housekeeper. The two appear to be married but aren’t. Another collection showed sexuality and its close link to violence while one other collection illustrates “contemporary movement” as a form of self-expression. The gallery as a whole was beautifully varied. The only thing that disappointed me was that there were only a couple of rooms with art on display. After seeing the Museum of Visual Arts, I feel inspired to visit larger Museums like the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art. To anyone that would like to visit the SVA Gallery, all I can say is that a great experience is only six minutes away.
