I was supposed to find my way over to the PMA to look at some art over the course of the week. But, I kinda realized it's sort of inconvenient for me to get to. And along with the fact that I don't really care for the PMA, I certainly wasn't going out of my way to go there. So, when I was on South Street this weekend, I decided to look for some art around there. I've been to South Street a handful of times and I always found myself wandering into the Dumpster Divers gallery (http://dumpsterdivers.org/ The website itself isn't very great, but some of the links to the artists are pretty nifty and definitely worth looking at) I like the Dumpster Divers gallery because there are pretty much always new things in there and the fact that some of these really cool things are made out of garbage is all the more appealing to me. I saw tons of nifty pieces like this guy!
But none of them really "spoke" to me enough that I could write a giant post about it. I could write little tidbits about all of them but that's not what I was asked. I had walked into the gallery and circled around it counterclockwise and when I was just about finished looking through the gallery I stumbled across this
I have no idea who the artist is, why it was created or what the title is. The few workers at the gallery were very preoccupied with various war stories and debates about politics and life for me to ask anything about it. I also looked through all the links on the Dumpster Diver's website and none of the artists' work seemed similar enough to this that I could even guess. It's kind of a shame but I guess there's nothing I can do about it... Anyway! This piece really caught my eye because it was so much unlike everything else in the gallery. This was one of the only pieces that was mainly flat and wasn't a sculptural piece. It was also one of the biggest things in there. I am terrible with eyeballing size and measuring things, but to give you an idea of scale, the heads of the 3 people in this were roughly life size. Whenever something is life size or larger, it always becomes a little more personal and invasive to the viewer I think. Even though the figures in the piece didn't look super 3-dimensional, I still kind of felt like they could come out of the work and stand next to me.
The piece is fairly limited in terms of the color palette. The entire piece is mainly black and white with splashes of color around the heads of the figures. Most of the pieces in the room at the time were a range of browns and everything was so crowded nothing really stood out. But, this piece was actually across from this really rich green fabric that had been wrapped around a support beam. The fact that the green fabric was there just really dulled this piece down when walking up to it. But looking directly at the piece, it still seemed very muted because the colors that are in the piece aren't at a very high chroma so they don't actually pop too much. I like that even though the piece is fairly flat, there are some elements on it that pop out, but not in a gaudy or awkward way. I like the splashes of color against the black and white, it adds for a nice touch but it's too overwhelming I think. I don't think I really disliked much of anything about the piece. There's no real reason why either. I just like it. The only thing that kind of bothered me is just the fact that there is a thick border on the top and then a little thin border on the top and nothing on the bottom. I'm also a little bothered by the fact that the one figure on the left is cut off while the other two are not. It just doesn't seem to have any real purpose to it. It's just me being nit-picky honestly...
Subjectively I can't really say anything about this piece because I go absolutely no background on it. No matter how much I searched I really just couldn't come up with a thing about it. Objectively, I feel like this could be a very powerful statement. I'm not entirely sure what on, maybe a certain race of people or a specific event that is taking place, but just by the set up of the piece I think it has some really intense meaning to it. The faces are the only photographic/3D elements to the piece, everything else is flat and graphic. The fact that the faces are different like that says to me that the faces are important.
I had gone with a few friends of mine and most of them don't really get art (but who's to say I do either) so they had only gone in because of me. The one guy I had been with walked up next to me and shouted a few colorful words because he found it utterly creepy. Other than that, no one actually paid much attention to this piece. Thinking about it now I guess to most people the cute little statue dudes made out of all these intricate little things is much more appealing than some fabric on a wall. I had asked my friends what they thought of it and they didn't really have much to say. Someone had thought of tribes. Someone thought of Africa. Nothing with much substance to say the least. When I looked at the piece I got a sense of solemnity and sadness in a way. The figures aren't smiling and looking closely at their eyes they just seemed empty to me. That could explain why the colors are muted because maybe these people are living in a supposedly color world but they just see it in a muted way because they are unhappy. Or maybe they're unhappy because this is a wedding or something. Like there is a little girl in the front being given away by her father, who is behind her, to this man who is to the left and no one wants to go through with it. I could probably sit and make up stories about this piece all day, but I will never be able to say for sure what on earth it's really about unless I asked someone.
