Project #3 Moving Through Space

Final Media Project #3_new from Daniel Plastrik on Vimeo.

Whitney Museum: Blog #4

Media 160, Spring 2018

I chose to visit the Whitney Museum as an alternative assignment and toured the exhibit on the fifth floor celebrating the artwork of the contemporary American artist Zoe Leonard. The display consisted of the artist’s photography and installations reflecting the use of compositional techniques of Leonard herself. One of the works was of a stack of suitcases presented in a color-coded pattern, evocatively conveying a somewhat bleak motif symbolizing the burden of one’s departmentalized past, serving to convey how human beings carry baggage of diverse hues and sizes. Another display involved a photograph of an aerial view shot depicting an urban landscape from a plane window, created by using an analog camera. It grabbed my attention because of the dramatic use of shadows Leonard uses to control what is and isn’t seen in the shot. Specifically, there is a shadow on the right side of the frame that prevents the viewer from seeing the whole content. The photograph conveys a sense of mystery and incompleteness, where you cannot discern all the details and either have to accept the shadowy blanks or imagine for yourself how to complete the image.  

Another eye-catching piece was a sculpture of a female figure, atomically laid out like the goddess Venus, only enclosed in a see-through coffin-like box and depicted nude but cut open at the torso. The tour guide explained how this presentation of the female represents an ideal of the female body while conveying deep ambiguity: the figure is both an object to be studied and an object of desire. The sculpture looked almost robotic to me, evoking fascination and repulsion. There was also a series of photographs, each depicting a severed human head in a bell jar, shown in a particular sequence. According to the tour guide, the centerline of each shot was positioned at the artist's eye level, so that the viewer is drawn to the eyes in the bell jar, picture to picture. One was drawn to the lifeless eyes, creating a chilly connection with the grotesque images. 

For the latter half of the tour, we were told about Leonard’s sociopolitical views, especially during the 1990s. Leonard is a feminist who feels deeply about climate change throughout the world and is committed social change. Her installation “Analogue” movingly depicts her concern about global warming in America, in Pakistan, and in Poland. In depicting ads for Coco Cola in her posters, she shows how the negative impact of corporate conglomerates and capitalism in general has manifested on culture and society, dictating the goods and services used that poison our bodies and our earth. Another installation, seen at the end of the exhibit, consisted of a myriad of postcards showing different shots of Niagara Falls. The tour guide pointed out that approximately 350 shots of this iconic location were used make up the totality of “Niagara Falls Landscapes.” To experience these posters as a whole transcends any single photograph, adding to the immense sense of beauty and natural wonder of the Falls. It transports one into a magical world, as all art should.