Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary was a wonderful exhibition for me to see. There were so many different kinds of artworks that I had never seen before, not because I never seen art, but each of the artwork was created with different kinds of materials. These materials can be found in our environment. Starting from a line of hair all the way to a big piece of furniture. They all started off as an original piece itself, but then they were used and become part of the artwork created by talented artistic to finish as a whole. The relationship between the part and the whole was very important because without the part, there will be no whole.
In the exhibition, there were five pieces of artworks that I liked the most. They were Skylines, Quarter Lounge, Spoons, Madam C.J Walker, and Portrait of a Textile Worker. Through these five exhibits, I will further explain what was the relationship between the part and the whole in these artworks.
Skylines were the first piece of artwork that I saw when I got off the elevator from the museum. I was amazed by the work of this artist El Anatsui who made these long skylines. The materials he uses throughout this artwork were flat square piece of aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire. By using these two materials as the part, Anatsui made a huge quilled pattern of skylines as a whole.
The Quarter Lounge was another piece of exhibit that I though was very creative because this artist Johnny Swing took the idea of art and money, and put together this lounge. The purpose of this artwork as Swing stated in the exhibit, “He first forces us to think about the relationship between art and commerce”. I probably think he wanted everyone to know that commerce is represented by quarter as the part, and art represented this steel sliver lounge when it was combined as the whole.
The next exhibit was Spoons, which was a three dimensional (3D) pyramid created by Jill Townsley. She uses 9,273 plastic spoons, and 3,091 rubberbands to stack together this 3D pyramid. When I first saw the display, I was amazed by Townsley with her concept of using three spoons and wrapped with a rubberband as the part and foundation for this pyramid. In the meantime, I was astonished when I watched the finish process of the spoons pyramid as the whole.
The fourth artwork was Madam C.J Walker who was the first African American woman to become a millionaire designed by Sonya Clark. This wonderful portrait was made up with only one material, which was an unbreakable plastic comb. The part of this portrait was quilled together with many plastic combs; the row of narrow teeth in the plastic comb distinguishes the facial shape of Madam C.J Walker. The whole of this artwork was greatly collaborated.
Last but not least, my favorite one of all was the Portrait of a Textile Worker. Terse Agnew created this masterpiece by using clothing labels, thread, and fabric backing to complete this portrait. This artwork was entirely sewed up with clothing labels as the part to represent the textile industry, especially, the workers who worked very hard in those factories. At the same time, I was captured by this whole piece of artwork when you saw the black and white color of the coloring labels to create the Bangladesh woman who was sewing a fabric on a sewing machine. Overall, this exhibition had taught me that we could take anything we had in our environment to recreate a new piece of artwork, and giving second lives back to the thing we found in life.