Galeries in Chelsea

On Tuesday, November 11th, my Concepts and Processes class went to New York City to visit some galleries in Chelsea. It was a really fun trip, we got to see a lot of artwork. My favorite experience of the trip was in the Kent Gallery, an exhibit of Charles Gaines titled Manifestos. This work was created using music, four manifestos: the Black Panther Manifesto, the Perspective for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life Manifesto, the Socialist Congress Manifesto and the Zapatista Manifesto, were written into musical format based on the letters within the words that were written. All the letters A-G were played as their musical equivalents, and the letter H was used for B-flat, as this was the code used in the early Baroque period. All other letters, punctuation, and spaces were played as rests. The music that was produced from this system was a bit random, but it sounded so beautiful, soothing, and relaxing. The most interesting part of that for me is that as speeches, these manifestos would have been delivered with force and passion, yet the rendering played by the piano quintet (one piano, two violins, a viola, and a cello), was just the opposite.

I also enjoyed most of the other exhibits we saw, some of the work I did not like so much, but I appreciate the fact that I got the chance to see it anyways. But among the work I did enjoy, these are the names of my favorite artists from the trip: Beth Campbell, Ben Durham, and Storm Tharp at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery; Petah Coyne at the Galerie LeLong; Ernesto Neto at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery; David Barnett at the Denise Bibro Gallery; and Christa Parravani at the Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery. There were many others, but these were my favorites which I found tobe the most inspiring to me as an artist.

Some of the information paraphrased about the work of Charles Gaines, as well as the image example of his work, was taken from the following website: http://www.kentgallery.com/exhibitions/current.html