I attended the “Variantology” exhibition in the Fredrick-Nelson Gallery on March 4th, 2015. This gallery featured works from Peer Bode, Barbara Lattanzi, Joseph Scheer and many other teachers and staff who worked in The Division of Expanded Media.
In this exhibition there was a lot of work related to photography and Expanded Media. I think their intentions in this gallery were to show people more about the different kinds of media, and to let people explore it for themselves. I think that this gallery accomplished that. People were engaged in everything the gallery had to show, and so was I. I think that everyone there had a appreciation for the art they were seeing and I really think it opened people’s eyes to everything media had to offer.
As for myself, the work was kind of cool for me as an animator to see and watch. I got to see a lot of different techniques and programs or styles used to make each piece. One that really stood out to me was the Blue Stampede by Barbara Lattanzi. It was made from software for real-time computation of generative graphics, using sensors, micropressor, and an HD projector. This work brought me back to the glitch projects we did freshman year. It is not the same project by any means, however, I watched the video and felt an admiration of it while watching it. I started to notice that the video didn’t just have a bunch of lines in them. Could have been my imagination, but I saw characters inside the montage. Once in a while it would change color and turn to green.
There was one piece of art by Mark Klingensmith called Heterothermic Shiver Sextet. It was done in 2014 and was a print and sound piece. Looking at this work of art kind of reminded me of Andy Warhol with his Pop Art in the 1960’s. His art was very colorful and had a lot of bright and neon colors, kind of like what Warhol worked with. The artist took pictures of moths and experimented with the colors a lot. It was a big piece, and on each line with was the same image repeated over and over again but with each image altered slightly in movement. Warhol’s art reminded me of a lot of the pieces in the gallery, because there were many different types of media there. Warhol used a lot of different art forms during his lifetime, such as performance art, filmmaking, video installations, and writing. I felt like the Gallery really showed this. There wasn’t many Pop Art there, however, there were a lot of film techniques and video installations which reminded me of Warhol.
One work called Twisting Dragons by Devin Henry was a multi-channel video. It was cool to watch in more than one way. The guy was doing slow movements; they were kind of like a battle form or battle stance. The man had two camera devices, one on each wrist, and as he moved his arms and wrists around, you could see which was the camera was facing. One of the reasons this piece spoke to me was because it let you get a new insight on your surroundings. You could view the man who was doing the movements, but at the same time you could watch the camera’s on each wrist and see what the images they were getting. I thought this was important because it reminded me of Donald Judd. One of the reasons why Donald Judd did the work he did was because he wanted people to pay more attention to the world around them. I think this piece is another interpretation of that idea, but is representing it in a different way. Instead of using geometric objects, Henry used camera’s and a man doing battle style movements to show us this. It’s a completely different representation of the same idea and I think it’s important to recognize that. Not only are there multiple ways of representing one idea, but also realizing the artists reasoning behind their works.
Callie McIntosh 