Event- De Young Museum Visit

I visited the De Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The Picasso exhibit was happening on the bottom floor so I decided to ditch the crowd and enjoy my first visit to the gallery.

I started on the bottom floor with the ancient tribal artifacts from the Pacifics and Africa.

Primitive mediums were brilliantly crafted into functional and representational items.

The skull on the right is a commemoration to an ancient ancestor. The eye sockets and bridge of the nose are inlaid with colored shells. The nostrils are fashioned with decorative horn spears through the septum. Sharpen teeth and woven feathered headdress are indicators a warrior leader.

Other items in the gallery ranged from religious deit

ies, fertility gods, and ritualistic tools. Some sculptures were over ten feet in height. Primitive mediums were used in a various manner. Bone, feathers, precious stone, wood, pigment, blood, and eventually metal were augmented to create functional and representational items. One of my favorite pieces, that I unfortunately didnt get a photograph of was a human skull ewer. The elegant form was bronzed on the long upward curving handle and spout. The body of the vessel was created from the skull of a monk fused to metal with resin. A very eerie and impressive sculpture and allegory. The totems were also some of my favorite. The mysteriousness that surrounds the carved guardians its attention grabbing. Intricate carvings all over the the surface of wood create a swirling visual movement.

The sculpture and glass collection was very impressive as well. Telouley and Volkus work was represented in a sculptural section of the gallery for their amazing glass and ceramic work.

Google Earth Project Critique

Project - 3d buildings on

Summary:

To start this project was a very difficult. Google Earth is different on many computers and We had many compatibility and visual issues. In the end, I was pleased with the outcome despite the few flaws in the presentation.

Idea:

To create a virtual tour that would show different aspects of urban city life. Showcasing different areas of the city that were of personal interest. We also had the idea to literally bridge the two cities together using a piece of architecture or icon. The Golden Gate was the easiest and most rational choice. We would accomplish this by transferring tours across the iconic Golden Gate bridge and Lions Gate bridge in Vancouver

Group:

Our group was lost for ideas when we first got together. Team Vancouver wanted to go in a more artist approach. Amal and I had other ideas about connecting ourselves to our school, city, and culture and relating that to Vancouver some way. We came up with a tour of the city and divided the city into districts and choose spots we enjoyed.

Making the Project:

One huge problem I continued to have was Google Earth unexpectedly shutting off. It was a huge annoyance on top of learning a new program. Google Earth is an amazing program with some incredible capabilities and visually, I thought our presentation was amazing. Despite the photos from different tours switching themselves, even after the hours and hours Amal and I spent trying to fix it and make it function correctly. Despite all of that, I enjoyed our long distance project. It made the world seem like a much smaller place. Media makes it possible to bridge space, time, location, and language instantly.

Event SF MOMA – Richard Serra Drawings

Joan Brown, Noel in the Kitchen 1964

I attended San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art on a Sunday. Richard Serra’s Drawing exhibition was being held on the fourth floor. On the second floor, was a fascinating gallery dedicated to the design ethos of Dieter Rams. I became fascinated with bay area post abstract expressionist figurative painters like David Park, Joan Brown and Richard Diebenkorn with their bright exaggerative lines and subtle narratives.

These underrepresented artists are exceptional. The photo on the right is Mother-in-Law, painted by David Park(1955). On the left is Richard Diebenkorn, Head of a Woman (1960) . One of my favorite elements of these pieces are the dramatic colors and heavy brush

work. Park's work sets a mood with his portrait of his mother in law. Sickly green contrasted with bright reds on the females face is distracting and intense. I also enjoy the gloomy, wet environment beneath her hat while the light blue above her hat suggests a clear day.

Diebenkorn is a truly impressive painter. His portrait is fantastic representation of figurative abstraction. The overall mood is subjective, but feels familiar, candid and referential. The cool blue surface is fluid and soft. The background contains a checker board pattern a common icon of retails, vendors, barbershops and hair salons. Thin, wispy and translucent brushstrokes make up the hair in a simple but well executed painterly tactic. Both pieces are a beautiful addition to the MOMA collection.

The Rams exhibit was truely interesting to witness. I was unaware of many design ideas that are in my everyday life. Fusion of accessibility and functionality are key elements to design. I enjoyed seeing the progression from the 'modern' look in the 1950's, to the simple modern design of almost everything made today. Apple products have succeeded in many ways, by adhering to these guidelines, as well as many other attributes. I cant wait to see what will be in place of Ram's designed appliances and iphones and iMacs at the exhibition 50 years from now.

Richard Serra is an artist who is outlandish, adventurous and dangerous. We know him from his controversial installation Tilted Arc. We also remember his use of molten lead during the 1960's and his lead House of Cards. I expected to find amazing things inside the gallery space, lead, earth, wild sculptures, design ideas, and dreams. Unfortunately, they were not present that day. Serra's gallery, on the whole, was rather ubiquitous. Many of the works look like they were sprayed with a thick black truck bed lining type material. Canvas sizes varied from large to really large. There were other areas were the entire wall was covered in the black tar. I enjoyed standing in the some of black walled areas, intended to define scale, proportions, space and material in the room.

more to come

Rams Principles of Good Design

http://www.vitsoe.com/en/gb/about/dieterrams/gooddesign

Good design...

..is innovative

...makes a product useful

...is aesthetic

...makes a product understandable

...is unobtrusive

...is honest

...is long-lasting

...is thorough, down to the last detail

...is environmentally friendly

...is as little design as possible