The Iron Pour

This Friday night I went to the Iron Pour. It was a really fun event in which the metal students show off their skills for the whole school. When I got there, the main event had not yet started, but there were other sources of entertainment. There were fire dancers, food, face painting, and a band was playing music. There were a lot of people there, some of them were even in costume. Then there was a large fenced off area where some sculptures were set up. The sculptures were made of wood, braided hay, and carved pumpkins. The metal students were fueling a fire in a bin, and they kept pouring pieces of iron in to heat them up and melt them.

When the main event of the pouring of the iron began, everyone flocked to the center area. It was actually very beautiful to see the sparks fly from the hot molten iron landing on the sculptures. The sparks were glittery and looked like the sparklers you play with during the fourth of July. Some of the sculptures caught on fire with contact, and some just looked to be glowing red, but did not actually burst in flame. Some of the things were also allowed to burn, and others were put out or cooled down with a hose of water, I'm sure for safety reasons. One girl was roasting marshmallows for people for people in the audience. It was really fun to see all of the sculptures change form through the flame, and the iron pieces, once cool, took on some very organic shapes and were beautiful to see.

Visit to the ICA

Ok, so I just watched the Red Sox lose game 7 to the Tampa Bay Rays; they will not be the World Series Champions this year, and I am totally devastated! But, on an art note, I can talk about my trip to the ICA today. This afternoon, I went down to the ICA to see the Tara Donovan exhibit, and it was absolutely mind-blowing! I have never seen anything like the works she has on display, and I will most definitely never be able to look at normal objects, like tape, toothpicks, straws, or Styrofoam cups, the same ever again. The way she was able to manipulate these ordinary materials to make such beautifully extraordinary work with them, I just fell in love with every piece I saw.

Not only is her work flowing, organic, beautiful, and unique, but it also seems to defy the laws of physics. My favorite piece in the show was titled Haze, 2005, and was made purely out of translucent plastic drinking straws. What surprised me the most as I read about it was that the only thing holing the entire volume of straws up were the corners of the walls. The straws were placed across an entire wall, but it is only their pressure against each other that allow the rest of it to hold up! The most mesmerizing part of this wall sculpture was the way the light and shadows reacted within the hollow tubes of the straws as you walk past it. It reveals a sort of reflection in this way that makes you look closer to discover the simple elements of the material and the composition of the whole.

There were plenty of other sculptures that I seemed unable to take my eyes off of, and I strongly recommend this exhibit to everyone, especially Mass Art students who can view it for free at the ICA.

My images were taken from Google images.

My God Mask

My senior year in high school, we read the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The book was about the main character, Okonkwo, and his life and his part in his village in Nigeria. It was a very interesting story and I learned a lot about that culture from the perspective of Okonkwo. During at least one point in the story, they have a ritual in which they call upon the Gods they believe in for advice. I can't quite remember the specifics or the number of Gods, but it was somewhere around 7-10, and they were embodied in that number of men from the village. The men would wear masks and dance around for the other people in the village and the people knew that it would be only the men, but they would treat them as if they were the actual incarnations of the Gods. Their bodies were just a sort of vessel so that the Gods could get down to Earth and speak to the people.

I have not done much re-search on the aesthetics of the masks that would have been used, but I like the idea of becoming a God just by adorning a mask, so I think I would like to make a large clay mask that represents a God that I would like to believe in for my second project and it will be based on the ideas from Chinua Achebe's book. I am not a religious person, I do not go to church or worship any God, so I want my God to be a God of Nature. Nature and the environment I live in are important to me, so I will make a God for that so that it is personal to me. I remember when I was a small child, my Dad asked me one night while tucking me into bed, "What do you think God looks like?" My favorite movie of the time was The Little Mermaid, so my response was, "I think He must look like King Triton." I thought of what an all powerful man who created the world would look like, and King Triton was the most powerful man under the sea in that movie, and really all of the movies I had ever seen, and he had magical powers, so it was natural for me to think that is what God would be like also. I want to make my mask just a little bit larger than the size of a normal mask, and I want to make it out of clay. I will do some more research on non-western masks over the next week and post that later.


I got the image of King Triton from Google images.

The Speaker Box Project

This Thursday I went to the Speaker Box Project because I had been meaning to get there for a while now. I got there at about 8pm and the band that was playing was called Idiolect, and they are described as a noise-groove jazz group. It was interesting because their sound was unlike anything I've ever listened to before. It was an unusual style because it sounded like organized noise, or random music, that was somehow pleasing to hear and kind of jazzy. It is really hard to describe the sound, so here is a link to their myspace page where you can listen to a selection of their music:

http://www.myspace.com/idiolectsound

It sounded really different in the speaker box because the acoustics were accentuated and everything echoed more in the large gallery. It was also very loud! I could not stay in there for long because my ears are sensitive to loud noises. I explored the constructions upstairs which were very weird and felt random, but that kind of went along with the music I was hearing. There were a lot of signs that were upside down or even broken. There was also a teddy bear in one and a lot of orange traffic cones. I did not really understand the concept of the piece, but I don't know if that was important. I would like to go back again when there is another band to see how my experience changes. I also wonder what it would be like in silence where I could listen to my own sounds or those that are made by other people there viewing it at the same time. I also wonder if it is so loud on the inside of the speaker as it is in the rest of the room.

I got this image off of the MassArt website.