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!