Walking in the gallery for the first time I noticed the atmosphere, it was pretty cold, a lot of open space for people to walk around, white walls and a dull looking brown painted on the pillars. The benches had pillows that were random colors and way to big placed on top. The lighting hitting only on the objects, paintings. The first body of work I came across was Jennifer Hines three paintings/photographs. The artwork to me feels somewhat weird and disturbing. Photographic images of naked women sitting holding themselves wrapped up and covered in some sort of plant liked rooted figure. The colors to me were somewhat random, as an artist myself I couldn't even relate to something like this. The pieces of personal growth, oddly shaped branches coming out of her, it just seemed generic. Another piece of work I stopped to look at was Colleen Mcgrann's of mine. 'A triptych of herself photography'. The three pictures looked rather creepy with the blurriness/mystery look to it. The pale yellow scheme, girl in white night dress looks like something out of a cheesy horror film. The process of her planting something isn't appealing since there is no visual of where she is, the background being emptiness. I couldn't feel really anything at her piece. Walking around the gallery I did seem to pause at the video clip created by Victoria Bradford called 'Blue focus'. I'm at a daze seeing images shoot out on the screen at random. The text looked like font from a typewriter, it moved at an awkward rate then disappears and reappears, background is always white, photos of a girl constantly being repeated. It looks like a complete mess and I was getting a slight headache. At first glance it just looks like a weird video to me, possibly if I had met the creator of this I would get a much better understanding. The most related piece of artwork I found out was to be a simple notebook. Kelly Parsell's my 'Spanish book revisited' was this piece. She used this book when she was a child learning Spanish but also had pictures of drawings she did and little notes. It was her personal little book that she did whatever she wanted to. I've also kept many journals, notebooks and sketchbooks from when I was younger and I can never seem to get rid of them. It's the stuff in the past I just don't want to forget or let go. A personal Journal.
Maria, you've taken a really interesting approach here, to write this as a narrative of your gallery visit. I'm not sure the gamble entirely pays off, though. The stream-of-consciousness approach here doesn't do much to help me figure out what's most important here, or what larger impressions you have of the show as a whole. We learn a lot about your individual reactions, but not so much about how you think other people ought to react and why. You do some really close observation here; I'd just to like to see you get a little more use out of those details here. And maybe we could get a link or two next time?
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