My Residual Reality Experience

I've never been to an art show before. I've been to museums with art but this was definitely different; it was a wonderful experience. I have a great respect for art and artists because I occasionally paint or take photographs just as a hobby. The 2 works I liked the most were of Ellen Brooks and Ken Josephson. The way Josephson integrates the postcards into the photos was interesting; I have an interest for graphic design and Josephson's "Fountain" reminded me of a project I did for a scholarship my senior year of high school. I really enjoyed that work. As for Ellen Brooks' pieces, I could just stare at them forever. Though I had and idea of how she created the pieces that were at the show I looked into her work. On her website (www.ellenbrooksart.com) you can browse through her works and she has a description of the different types of work she has done. The pieces that were at the Residual Reality show were from her "Screens" collection. She gave a thought-provoking explaination of what they were about and why she did them. Here is the statement from the screens collection off of her website:

"These photographs are addressing issues of cultural longing, the images having their origins in the natural world but removed from nature, firstly through the artifice of over-cultivation and grooming inherent in the imagery —golf courses, night-lit landscapes, gardens, artificial waterfalls, bonsai trees— and further through the media packaging of beauty as presented in magazines and theme calendars. By re-photographing these subjects from the glut of existing images in our culture, the photographs become reflective of the culture, simultaneously fulfilling a contrived yearning for beauty while denying the direct experience of it. The issue of adapting imagery from pre-existing sources is not one of appropriation or authorship but of utilizing popular imagery as metaphor for a condition of cultural desire—images of sushi as icons for the popularization of the exotic. The source images are painted over to enhance and exaggerate or repress areas, and then re-photographed through a dense screen, transforming the imagery into a “crystalline composite of color”. The familiar becomes elusive in the struggle to regain a recollected orientation to what is now generalized in a molecular surface, the screen acting as a “leveler of the language”. -1987 "

I love the way she expresses her view of our culture and how they are extracted from the natural world.

Overall I enjoyed the show. These artists have the most creative minds. It was very refreshing to see that.