27 October 2009

Gallery Visits.

This past weekend I headed into the city for a concert at the Fillmore, but hit some galleries on the way...because, well we had to....

Ah, we looked at a few shows and even hit the MET, which I'm not a fan of, we looked at the Robert Frank show there (which I actually liked, more on that later).

At the galleries we checked out a few shows, it happened to be a pretty miserable day, weather wise, and basically headed down the street stopping in each one getting drenched inbetween. now there were two shows that stuck out in my mind. The one had a bunch of cast objects most notably a car that was made out of leather, which was pretty neat, it was just hanging in the middle of this rather small space. What was neat was that the leather still had the number the cow was branded with on it. Pretty cool. David Baskin was the artist's name, at the Freight Volume gallery. I'm not sure if there was any substantial meaning behind everything, I just thought it looked neat.

The other gallery show that stuck out was the one that featured work by Sister Mary Corita, which was a design show. The works all had a really cool graphic use of text, but specifically hand-written text, it wasn't particularly clean. I liked how she took a lot of popular phrases and quotes, and mixed and matched them to create a new context. Another thing of note is that she was a Nun, and that a fair amount of work had a religious context, and a positive one at that, which was something different, and I thought to be really interesting.

The Robert Frank show reminded me of movies, and upon checking out wikipedia, I remembered why, he directed the really bizarre but interesting documentary on the Stones 'Cocksucker's Blues', which we had watched in Seminar last year.
The Americans photos were something I enjoyed, possibly because the subject matter seemed to be forgotten moments, and almost forgotten people. Most of the people in these photographs aren't really consequential, they're just regular, if not less than. The one photo that still stands out was the one of the man in the cafeteria, which had this haunting sadness and desperation, it told this guy's story with one single image.

1 comment:

Gerry Beegan said...

Good points. I think you could link at least two and possibly all three of the shows in terms of American history. Frank was looking at the social problems in the 1950s that Sr. Corita was experiencing in the 1960s.