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My favorite of the whole exhibit was Robert and Shana Parkeharrison. Their piece was called Edison’s Light. It consisted of performance, photography, sculpture, and painting. It was of a man on a unicycle machine hooked up to lights and rods cycling towards a storm where lighting bolts are hitting the ground close by. It was so different than all the other photographs and had a theme of failure. No matter what, they described, there always will be failing, and that is just part of life. This piece stood out to me because it had so much creativity and adventure. Just looking at it can create a story. It reminded me of a book I read as a child called the Time Machine. All in all the exhibibit was great and was probably the best out of the four I went to this semster.

CSUSM Library

This exhibition was of the photography by Leland Foerster. It was all about agriculture in the Imperial Valley. The majority of the photographs consisted of the workers of the agricultural farms and the problems they face that we may overlook. Also, it is all about the use of water and how not many people really understand the seriousness of urban uses of water and carelessness in wasting it. My favorites of the exhibit were mainly the Family and Community section because I love how they are all low saturation just to the point of only a couple key points in the photo have color coming through while the rest are slightly black and white. It gave a feeling of reality and also happiness. It went along with the importance of agriculture and our environment by showing love, it showed family and happiness and something to live for. Also, in all the hard work they, which is much more of a labor job than most jobs we have, they are still able to be happy.

The Museum of Contemporary Art II

This exhibit was amazing because it consisted of mainly giant installations. My favorite stuff there was all by Dario Robleto who did an amazing piece of a big mirror. It had a wreathe like braid making a giant circle with skeleton hands holding the circle all around it. The hand consisted of human hands and bear claws. Some were actually human hands with bear claws which were obviously created but looked amazing. It gave a feeling of cave men and also different creatures that are just like humans. In the mirror you can look down and see yourself while you look at these hands that resemble humans. There are big hands and little hands, so the little human hands seem like children while the giant human bear claw hands are big enough to stand above the little hands like a parent. My other favorite piece was by Diana Thater. She took sixteen television flat screens and put them up on a giant wall just like photographs. As a whole they all played animals around the world as one giant screen.

Museum of Contemporary Art

This exhibit was of 14 women artists and photographers. It consisted of many different types of artwork but revolved around the exploration of the memory through connections and oppositions. The one piece that really stood out to me was a chromogenic print called “The Day the Earth Caught Fire from The Day, the Earth” by Susan Silton. She was able to make here images almost stand out the same way a hologram works. There were many color bars on the portrait and you can not see the photographic very well unless you are looking at it from the side. The bars open up and let you see through, but when you stand straight ahead from it, it mainly covers the image in the colors.

Another piece I enjoyed was “100 Boots” by Eleanor Antin. It consisted of fifty one post cards all lined up horizontally on the wall. She used in the photographs 100 boots to simulate a picture in her memory that could have been reality. The exhibition explains it as depending on an almost impossible use of medium to make a false memory of something that occurred as a dramatic act. It is interesting because they explain that the camera is used in this case as a tool to self-consciously construct an image that can model reality but does not really show the original fictional act of what was going on.

The main style I want the theme to lean towards is definatly tradition, more so Asian traditition. Statues, golds, creatures and stories are found all over and that is so different than what we have here around our towns. With Chinese in a lot of the shots and different fonts to match it would give a traditional feeling.