Event 3: da hamma

This last week, I took my first visit to the UCLA Hammer Museum. Never having been there, I of course had to spend my first half an hour playing on the fun rolling chairs they had in the atrium. After that I took a stroll through the painting gallery and listened to a few stories about how people that had their portraits done way back when were the ones with the largest egos because of how expensive and time-consuming they were. But finally after all of that I went to the only other open gallery room that wasn’t undergoing changes in exhibits.

In this gallery was a small corridor that led to an exhibit titled This is the End. A curios title deserves to be explored and the corridor led to a room with a movie projected onto a screen and ~bean bag chairs~ to sink into. The exhibit cycled through three short films by three different artists that each presented on topics in an unconventional and surrealistic manner. The film I saw was titled Even Pricks by Ed Atkins, which explored the physical and emotional manifestations of depression.

The film used digitally rendered images of a monkey, a man’s arm, and a bed as the main focus points. Not much was said, but when there were words they sounded mostly like gibberish. The part that really spoke to me was the man’s arm, which held a thumbs up. Things would happen to the thumbs up such as the arm twisting to make it a thumbs down, or the thumb would deflate, re-inflate, eventually explode, get rained on, etc. They all played a part in showing the viewers that the mental well-being and happiness of a depressed individual is as unpredictable as weather, taking wild turns from severe anxiety to sudden bliss then back to anxiety. It was really fascinating to see the beautiful CGI effects being used not just to show things other than sci-fi and popular media, but for art concerning our mental health. I am excited to look up other pieces by Atkins and others that explore other deep themes!

EVENT TWO: GHETTY ME OUTTA HERE 4/19

Hahaha, but seriously The Ghetty Center was very packed that Sunday. Nevertheless,  I did not let that get in the way of me enjoying this wonderful place for the first time! I was not sure what I was going to write about when going here, so I walked around and looked at all of the art chronologically and made some observations.

The first pieces I saw were dated before 1400AD and it was quite apparent that the concept of perspective was not very widespread as most paintings were very two-dimensional and mostly had religious scenes where the people mostly had profiles of faces. It was not until I walked around paintings dated around 1600 that I saw Brunelleschi’s influence on perspective reach nearly all of the paintings. After this point the paintings became more and more realistic; all of the faces had every wrinkle noted perfectly and each bowl of fruit looked quite appetizing.

The architecture of The Ghetty Center itself is a sight to behold. It is very clear that the architecture was carefully designed to really take advantage of the ever-shining Los Angeles sun with walls of glass and louvers to capture the natural and quite plentiful light. Some parts of the building’s exterior reflect a golden ratio-esque theme. I also marveled in the beautiful contrast between the natural mountainous surroundings to the north and the glorious view of the city to the south which made me think of the theme of this class: The mountainous landscape representing the artistic beauty, the city view representing scientific achievements, and the museum itself showing both joined together to create a utopia where both aspects thrive off of each other, which I thought was pretty dang cool. I hope everyone gets the chance to visit The Ghetty Center; I know I want to return to see everything that I missed!

(golden rectangle????)

Event 1 ArtSci at CNSI 5/12

(I'm sleathily taking a photo in uniform which is forbidden -thunder and lightning-) 

While between shifts, I had just enough time to check out an ArtSci exhibit at our very own California Neuroscience Institute in south campus! I was only able to stop by for around twenty minutes, but it was plenty of time to read through all the pieces! The honorable mentions include a map where everyone was prompted to trace out their walking path of the day on a map of campus using yarn and map pins, and a neat piece with sections of the brain displayed with flip-book paper pieces that people had drawn on.

The piece I found the most intriguing, was Rahul Iyengar’s “Origins”. Mr. Iyengar was not present while I was at the exhibit, but he did leave a nice description next to his piece. It had three images with different swirls on them: one that represented the golden ratio, one with an ammonite fossil, and one with fractal spirals. Each piece has inspirations from the golden ratio spiral that we saw in our lectures, as it appears in natural circumstances such as weather patterns, nautilus shells (to an extent), etc. He noted that the swastika is also similar in appearance, but in the context that in Hindu, it represents the creation of the universe and the “arms of time.” I found the last comment very fascinating considering that it is a very taboo symbol in our culture, so it was nice to see it from a different (and much more pleasant) perspective!