The exhibition, Second Lives, Remixing The Ordinary at The Museum of Arts and Design, features artwork and installation of many international artists. The ground-breaking fact is that their installations are made from ordinary manufactured articles, which are originally made for another purpose. Some of them where Bluffs by Tara Donovan (shirt buttons glued resembling a rare form of coral or seaweed), My Back Pages by Paul Villinski(flock of black and polychrome butterflies cut from vintage vinyl records).
At the second
floor, was Devorah Sperber’s After Mona Lisa 7, 2008, which is made out of 5,084
spools of thread hung from an apparatus using stainless-steel ball
chain. Of all the installations in the gallery, this seemed to be a puzzle,
because at first glance, the artwork appeared to be a random arrangement of
threads in different colors. If we take a closer look, Devorah created an
inverted pixilated abstraction of a famous painting using hundreds of spool of
thread. The installation is an image of Mona Lisa with a digital camera held up
by the arm of a tourist, directly in front of her face.
I was fascinated
with the idea of bringing science and concepts of digital technology along with
art, because the real image of the installation can only be resolved by using a
viewing sphere or the surface of a convex mirror, involving science- principles
of convex mirror1. The image is scanned to get the color pixel
patterns and are correlated with the standard color-codes of Coat and Clark
brand thread, there by combining both computer and craft art. Devorah, through
her installation bring out the principle of visual perception versus reality as
a subject experience, “what we see is not what exactly it is”. Visual
perception takes place due to fixation, the first time we see the installation,
it’s barely recognizable, entirely depends how the eye and brain sense the data. The color of the thread and the way they are pixelated, we do
believe, what we are seeing is a recognizable portrait, that’s why I had a jolt when the actual image was revealed when viewed with a sphere right in the middle of the room.
Devorah’s work
reminded me of Satoshi Kon's Japanese animated film “PAPRIKA”, in a very similar way when I saw the very
first time, I had no clue what was happening. The movie was about illusions and
reality. It started off with a scene from the circus show and it seemed the
part of an investigation, but was really a illusion of an investigator. The
Chief of the lab, Dr. Chiba, the lead role of the movie, had her alter-self
named as PAPRIKA and she existed as an ideal girlfriend who makes the
investigator happy, and the one who is always ready to help the head of the
scientist, she is flexible and she is capable of doing anything according to
their whims and fancies, but in real she
was just an illusion in everybody’s mind. There was a scene which was
repeatedly shown too many dolls walking in the street( a procession) and one of the character
said they are people who are caught up between illusion and reality. I felt too
many dummies walking on the street, but for real, it resembles the common human
being, who live in this world, who have their lives the same way as the dolls in the scene. One person’s illusion can be perceived by the other, which first seems to be as is but put a little more thought, is reality.
1The reflective surface of the convex mirror
bulges toward the light source. Convex mirrors reflect light outwards,
therefore they are not used to focus light and forms a virtual image
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