Art Show

On Saturday, I went to a museum and looked at art. Pretty classy, huh?

Well, it wasn't really a museum. I think it's really an industrial barn or something. But it was made into a museum for the show, which took up two floors. For some reason, it was floors one and three, so there was a zone of non-museum in between the properly art-infested areas.

The art was from students graduating from the Cornish College for the Arts here in Seattle. The official name was "The Cornish College of the Arts Art and Design BFA Show," so the artists were "presenting a senior thesis or a selection of material from their senior portfolio" according to the official program. I'm not sure if that means that everybody in the show has just received their BFA or if some of them didn't actually graduate. I mean, if it's all people's theses, that means they were probably being graded, and some of them might not have passed. Technically, I think that means that some of the pieces aren't officially Art. It would be cruel but entertaining if they put people's grades in the program. Like when you go to a Science Fair (come to thin kof it, I haven't been to a good Science Fair in years) and some science projects have awards on them, which means that the others have been deemed Adequate At Best.

Okay, I got distracted by the science project analogy. I have a great science project story, but it'll have to wait. The thing is, there were a lot of artists and designers represented, and they each had their own little area, about the size of my cubicle at work. I guess that's not very informative unless you already know how big my cubicle is. But you get the idea, right? You're standing in one person's vision, and then you walk ten feet and you're in an entirely different environment.

It's going to be challenging to talk about the show, since I don't have any pictures. I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but it's really not easy to take a visual medium and describe it strictly with words. Especially because I'm working off these scribbled notes I made.

I walked to the show, which was (according to the Internet) 1.2 miles away from my home. That's the second weekend in a row where I've done some walking. I really ought to do it more often. The show was in this big industrial building. Floor one was the Design Students, and was, as you might expect, a hodge-podge of "stuff".

A lot of people appeared to have done some sort of architectural project. But their presentations were frequently designed to such a point that I wasn't sure what their proposed building would be like. They'd have little shadowboxes of rocks that I think were meant to indicate what sort of textures they wanted to use, but only a couple had models of the buildings. There was one where one side of the installation (is that the right word?) had architecture, and the other had three boxes with wooden hands touching, in order, punchcards, a 3.5" floppy disc of QuattroPro, and a compact disc. It had something to do with how the tactile aspects of technological information storage have changed, and I thought it was neat. But I'm not sure if that was separate from the blueprints or what.

Oh! One of the architectural ideas involved a 56" plasma screen that could rotate 180 degrees to be seen in either of two different rooms. That's not a bad idea, although it does require a pretty big television. The thing is, though, I've seen that on Monster House. I'm assuming that the student didn't just rip an idea off from a cable show, but it was still a little odd.

The three things I thought were neatest were probably all mistakes. One person had a series of statements done with black text on clear plastic rectangles. They were readable because the walls were white, but the white walls only went so far up, and because the rectangles started pretty high, the top one wasn't readable; I had to go off to the other side of the room, standing in someone else's installation, before I could read it. I like the idea of doing things that force the viewer to move around to get the whole story, but I'm pretty sure the designer just didn't notice that the walls weren't white all the way up. Another piece had a big collage of pictures, all of which had words in them. It was about how typography is taking over the world or something. Anyway, a projector on the ceiling was shining the words "Imagine a World Without Words" in white light on the pictures. It wasn't quite readable, so I had to interpose my program to read it. Again, I like the idea of making the viewer interact with the art in order to get the message, but I think the light was probably meant to be stronger. The third thing was upstairs on the Art Floor. We're not there yet, so I'm going to continue with the Design Floor.

One person had come up with Personal Rest Stations which I think were supposed to be scattered around the city for homeless people to sleep in. My favorite part was a picture with the caption "transported to site by forklift." So many people neglect to mention how their creations will be transported. And let's face it, forklifts are good choices.

I was expecting a lot of, let's say, art-student stuff. And there were certainly more designs for meditation centers than I felt were strictly necessary, not to mention the two or three pieces that were devoted to the statement that Republicans are bad. But I guess it makes sense that graphic design students would work on advertising, so I shouldn't have been surprised to see things that were basically commercial in nature. One person even had a proposal for a more robust and informative rating system on videogames, stating that they had too much violence and fantasy. I was surprised by this, because normally I find that art students are strongly against anything that even approaches censorship. I mean, ratings aren't censorship, but -- look, you get my point. I was expecting one thing, I got another.

My favorite thing on the Design Floor was this one guy's timeline of the process of creating a thesis for the BFA show. I know, I rolled my eyes at first, too; it seemed like straightforward self-referentiality. But there was a lot of good, solid entertainment value in it. He had one timeline that represented the Designer's Ideal Expected Process, which involved things like "Getting Eight Hours of Sleep a Night", "Spending Time with Family" and "Finishing Project Early and Going on Vacation to Hawaii" and another "Real Timeline" that documented lots of dead ends, false starts, and time spent playing XBox. It was funny, and I approve of that.

Now, on to the Art floor, which involved walking up two flights of stairs. I understand that on Opening Day, the place was unbelievable crowded; but on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of the two weeks of show, it was deserted.

The third thing I enjoyed even though I suspect it was a mistake was on the Art Floor. Most of the design installations had at least one wall separating them from other areas, but on the art floor, things were more enclosed. People mostly had their own little rooms with white walls. So I went into this one dark room with black walls. All I could see was a bright purple rectangle on the far wall. Huh. What's the deal? This is the Art Floor, so almost anything could be going on. I stepped forward gingerly until I was just inside the room. No idea what's happening. When I took one more step forward, the wooden floor gave way, falling about three inches. It hit some water, and the purple rectangle turned into neat waves and bubbly things. It turns out there was this rectangular pool of water in the middle of the room, and when it was disturbed, whatever light was projecting the purple light on the far wall did, um, something. Upon further review, I was able to establish that there was a face being projected on the water, but it was really light and hard to see. And that the face was occasionally being changed. Anyway, I don't know quite how it was supposed to be working or what was supposed to be going on, but I don't think it was operating quite properly. It's possible the wooden floor wasn't supposed to give way, so maybe I was supposed to walk all the way into the pool.

Some of the installations had sound effects. One had a short story being read aloud while the patron (viewer? I'm talking about the person wandering through the art making notes, i.e. me) sat and watched a slide show. A couple installations even had their own smells. That may not have been on purpose. There was one person who had drawn directly on wood, and that room smelled of, well, wood. It was like that. Not necessarily intentional, but still the sort of thing that contributed to each artist's section having its own environment.

As expected, some of the pieces were a little too . . . experimental for me to get into them. One person had a big pile of one-inch-high plaster letters in a corner, with a note saying it was all the letters in Exodus. Huh. What am I supposed to do with that? I wonder if it really was that set of letters. It would look exactly the same as a pile of random letters, you know.

The main reason I went to the art show, aside from the opportunity to make myself appear cultured, was to see the work of Ann Koi. I've seen some of her work before, like in the Wizards of the Coast Call of Cthulhu book and the teeny Hello Kitty Illuminati painting I have in my front hall. But she had a couple of Big Things here. Each was constructed of small canvases separated by a few inches. You know, like a triptych, but with more than three paintings, and arranged in two dimensions instead of just a line. The smaller paintings weren't all the same size, and according to the little card, some of them were done on "salvaged canvas", which I think is neat.

Okay, standing in Ann's enclosure, you're facing a wall with two alcoves. In the right alcove is a piece which looks sort of like a Merry-Go-Round horse with -- you know what? I don't know if I can describe it properly. The one in the left alcove was even more complicated, being a mix of painting and sculpture. It had medical equipment and tubes connecting the different parts, and to get a good look at it, I had to look from at least two distances. As I've mentioned before, I approve of art that requires the viewer to physically move around to see what's going on.

On my walk home, I kept pretending the world was more art. It was fun trying to come up with a reason why someone would have designed I-5 like that.