The Cocktail Party Effect

Kangaroo (2017) by Michael Cook Admittedly, photography is not my favorite medium, but I wanted to give the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego a fair chance. I do not hate photography, I just appreciate other mediums (like painting) more. With the ease of a smartphone camera and the abundance of images on social media, photography seems commonplace to me. While I may be indifferent about photography, I have always wanted to go to Australia; luckily for me, the exhibit is called  “Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia.” The exhibit was divided by individual artists who gave a brief summary of what they hoped to achieve in their series of chosen photos. Through this exhibit, I was able to identify what I believe to be the unique strengths of photography. A Moment in Time and Patrick Pound Patrick Pound is a Melbourne-based artist whose presented work is a series of photos that he found making a complication called Air Moving Right . ...

Entrance to the exhibit The theme of this year’s MET Gala was ‘camp,’ prompting celebrities to dress in outrageous outfits. At the time of the event’s photos overwhelming my Instagram feed, I had largely dismissed camp as something to be appreciated only by teenagers abusing a Snapchat filter. Personally, camp just seemed unsophisticated and, well, weird. However, the Camp: Notes of Fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed me the nuances of camp revealing a complex and elusive concept.   Presentation Camp is an attitude of sorts well captured by its French origin se camper which means ‘to flaunt’ or ‘to posture;’ camp is not one thing, but rather a complicated and calculated art of presentation.  Large parts of camp are related to how one stands to create an ideal form or ‘beau ideal’ such as contrapposto—standing in a way in which the arms and shoulders balance out the hips and legs—and often having an arm akimbo—hands on one’s hips wi...

   The Ten Largest (1907) Hilma af Klint Even though the exhibit “Paintings for the Future” featuring Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s work at the Guggenheim Museum ended this past winter, “The Ten Largest” series (featured above) has stuck with me. The ten pieces are labeled and thus ordered as a human life cycle beginning with childhood, going to youth, adulthood, and eventually old age. I believe examining the passing stages of one’s life is a universal concept, one to which people of all walks of life can relate. By engaging with this grandiose topic, af Klint’s “The Ten Largest” already has a heightened sense of importance in this exhibit. However, in addition to taking on such an ambitious topic, I think there is another layer to af Klint’s work as it transcends mediums as well. The design can be connected with the short story “Masque of the Red Death” by American writer Edgar Allen Poe . To my mind, a universal concept repeated with the same kind of imag...

Emergence (2013) Sayaka Ganz At the Stamford Museum and Nature Center , the building was small but the grounds were vast. The Nature Center had a petting zoo area, but I have never been one for animals, so I mostly stayed inside. Alas, the inside was filled with animals as well. The main exhibit featured animal sculptures by artist Sayaka Ganz which were made up of common household appliances like ladles and forks. The exhibit was named “Reclaimed Creations” to demonstrate how prosaic items can be aesthetically repurposed.   Some of the featured pieces were sculptures of horses. These 3D horses had a tremendous amount of movement to them despite being made of a multitude of static objects. Artists like 18th century British painter George Stubbs worked to revolutionize the portrayal of horses by drawing attention to muscle and tone of the animal itself -- demonstrated in "Whistlejacket" (seen below). While Ganz was not painting horses as Stubbs once did, she capture...