art responses

Richard Serra

Sequence reminded me of life and the rust reminded me of home.

In the selectively echoing corridors formed by the whale-sized, reinforced steel slopes and caves, my footsteps became my greatest fear.  I heard them twice and three times and then they echoed silently, whispers by the time they met my ears.  Sequence was discordant, yet balanced, yet chaotic.  I couldn’t keep a straight line because of the angular structure that was both solid and fluid, causing me to veer off or place all my weight on one leg.

There’s something about rust and steel that indicate a sad past.  Rust happens when purity meets time and becomes imperfection.  The straight walls of a figure eight sequence invert and exhale and create imperfect sharp moments among passive aggressive smoothness.

I don’t know exactly what Serra was saying when he made Sequence but I think it was sad and chaotic and perfect.

Robert Misrach

Cantor’s lush green lawn reflects on the photograph’s plastic covering.  In the photograph the skies are gray, and the skies are gray, and clouds come from the west but I don’t know what they’ll rain on this graveyard.

When Katrina hit, there were formerly buried corpses floating with the freshly drowned.  In Louisiana, they try to bury their dead above ground to avoid that during the flooding.  Me Me Murphy lays beside her husband James, a WWII vet.  Their flower vases are comparatively empty, lifeless as the graveyard next to steaming refineries and chemical processes.  In front of their memorials grass peeks through the sidewalk, grown, overgrown, overwrought, unsung.  Jesus stands crucified among smokestacks, nailed by the iron that builds them.

The pipes that line the graveyard border barbed fences, to keep the dead out.  In the foreground a spigot shouts water from a cracked steel pipe, yet around it the grass is yellow and crispy.  The older tombs show lime and calcification, but the sedans parked on the other side of the fence are strong and shiny and clean.

Taft, Louisiana.  Cancer alley.

rework pipe, flooding, gray skies images

Youngsmith

I’m glad I’m going to get to talk to this girl before I fully decide to write about how I think her art is a reflection of herself.  The first word I wrote down was ‘IDENTITY’, which felts and feels cliché but was a striking sensation throughout her exhibit.  There’s something deeply personal about collecting your sketchbook into an animated film exhibition.  There’s also an inherently deep and personal connection to your art when you’re an Asian-American female at this school and you’re drawing ‘Super Geisha’, ‘Robot Ghost’, ‘Robogirl’ and the piece I focused on – ‘Hoarder’.  Her identity and personality as a woman, an Asian woman and a Stanford student seemed to be in forefront for her as an artist and us as its consumer.

‘Hoarder’ depicts a hunch-backed girl carrying an exorbitant load on her back and backpack.  The load is dipped in a pink haze that drips onto the subject herself and covers all the items, rendering one dimensional the various objects that this girl carried: a squid, cup noodles, a XOX hat, an apple, a flask from Colorado and a crown on top of it all.  These items that were once vibrant and individual are turned into pink sludge with a healthy dose of this translucent paint.  Her own colors are washed out and dull.

It’s an easier piece to guess at and ‘carrying something on your back’ isn’t too much of a metaphor for us thick students to draw from this piece.  Things that may have once may have made the subject happy are no longer happy things, just weights to hold her back.  She has already dropped a paper crane, a symbol of her culture, while carrying these other, apparently more important objects.