But is it Art?
We’ve been feeling a little burnt out as of late and decided to take some time to experience art in hopes to spark creative joy and rekindle our love for color, texture and creating.
Over the past couple weeks, we have been lucky enough to take time to go out and see some very cool works modern art. Jenn and Alexa took a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art a couple weeks back, and this past weekend Alexa and I (Sam) took a trip up to Beacon, NY and went to the Dia Beacon.
In the coming few months we want to challenge ourselves in the studio to create a few samples and maybe even an art piece or two that have been inspired by what we saw. While, both museums highlight modern and contemporary art it was amazing to see the vast array and difference at each place. Here are some of our favorite pieces.
MoMA
The MoMA lobby is now home to Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised, a large digital display. Unsupervised is an AI that has been fed the data on every piece of art in the museum, and blends that data into a constant stream of generated images. It’s not just its size that makes Unsupervised mesmerizing, but also the wonder of seeing art being created in real-time.
Another interesting piece was Moira Dryer’s NBC Nightly News. Made of wood and metal, Dryer’s piece is both a sculpture and a painting. The piece of wood is curled up and pinned in a way where it looks like it may pop back open at any moment, making the viewer second guess the amount of space that the work it meant to take up. With the back of the piece being painted a plain gray, its visibility makes you feel like you’re taking a peek behind the scenes.
Dia Beacon
The Dia Beacon is housed in an old Nabisco factory, not far from the Hudson River. Its open floor plan and generous amount of natural light make it the perfect place for large sculptures, earthworks, and glassworks.
One of our favorite works we saw was Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. Serra’s three ellipses—large circular structures made of steel plates—all had their own sense of movement to them. There are openings on the side so that visitors can go inside the ellipses, either directly through the opening or through a spiral-like tunnel that opens up into the wider middle area. Being in such a wide yet enclosed space was a unique feeling, a friend of ours compared it to being “inside a salad bowl.”
Larry Bell’s Standing Walls were a series of glass panels arranged in a room flooded with natural light. One cluster of blue glass walls are set on a pink rug, the light coming through the glass and reflecting off the rug giving the ceiling overhead a soft, pink glow. The transparent blue glass and the composition’s overall reflective nature make the space that it’s in feel light and open. By contrast, another group of Bell’s walls are dark and mirror-like, set on a dark rug. Though they are in the same space as the first grouping, the change of color and the
