such a dork!

Spring Show at the Erie Art Museum

A couple of coworkers and I wandered over to the Erie Art Museum during lunch to see the annual Spring Show. I don't go to the museum often, but I always enjoy it when I do. I am by no means a discerning art critic, and the following commentary should be taken with a grain of salt.

There were some paintings I really liked by Sarah Burke that had sort of mottled-colored silhouettes of people in various stages of distress or excitement. They were neat images and I think a series of them would look really good together.

An artist from Cleveland (whose name escapes me) had some cityscapes that looked bleak and funky. They kind of looked inked, actually, but the card said it was all paint. In either case, they were really cool and emotive.

The one piece that really grabbed me, though, was called "Under the Bridge" (again, I don't recall the artist's name). It was a mixed-media book that replicated the experience of looking up through a network of girders and supports—I know: hardly a life-changing experience, but interesting to me because it's a visual that can't accurately be replicated in a photo.

Some things simply don't translate to two dimensions. No matter how arresting the real-life, three-dimensional thing is, it loses its luster the moment you flatten it out. If you don't believe me, spend some time looking at pictures of the Grand Canyon and then go check out the real thing.

Each page of this book was a flat image, obviously. It had several criss-crossing beams, all suitably grungy and rusty. The spaces around them were cut out so that you could see multiple pages stacked up together. Each page was also about a quarter-inch thick. The result, when the pages are viewed together, gives you the sense of three-dimensionality you'd have from looking at something like that in real life without losing the scale of it, as you would in a sculpture.

So, bravo to you, artist whose name is hiding in the show pamphlet I left sitting on my desk at work and isn't included for some reason on the website. I have no idea if you were thinking anything remotely like what I got out of it, but I enjoyed it.

Labels: art, museum, painting, perspective, spring show

posted by Smitty @ 5:02 PM