The Walker

Today we went to the Walker museum of art, and the Bell museum of natural history in Minneapolis MN. We went to the Walker to look at some contemporary art, and we went to the Bell to look at stuffed animals, most of which are indigenous to Minnesota, and we each drew at least one or possibly more of the animals. I'll talk more about that in my next post, but for this one I'm going to focus mainly on the Walker.

There were a couple of interesting things at the Walker including photos, sculptures, kinetic pieces, videos, and even a live performance installation piece.

The live performance was interesting. It challenged the viewer to concentrate and contemplate the body as a system of small pieces, but recognize it as one large powerful whole. That moves ever so gracefully. As I was observing, I thought about how many muscles there are in the body. This has really been on my mind since we have started putting more and more clay on the mannequins. Working with the mannequins has affected my understanding of the muscle system greatly. Realizing that there are so many different muscles that are similar in size shape and placement but they are all responsible for their own movements. It is very obvious that it is a combination of all these muscles that make each movement, flex, extension, and restrictions possible.

The piece that I liked the most was a kinetic sculpture that used a mirror to reflect light through a plastic cup, and on to a wall. What made this piece interesting was that the cup was on its side on a small rotating platter that was slanted at an angle. The result was a large moving shadow/light. Some of the plastic created shadow, and some of the plastic focused the light into odd and interesting patterns. I liked this because the cup would never roll in exactly the same way. It would always bounce around, or slow differently with each rotation, and this made the piece eternal. Also the fact that it was not only a shadow being cast but also light being focused added a huge amount of interest letting the viewer discover both sides of light at the same time, and even survey how they intereact.