The exhibit, “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary” at the Museum of Art and Design presents extraordinary works of art constructed from ordinary objects. Buttons, clothing labels, forks, q-tips, glasses and a variety of other typical everyday items are used as building blocks to create amazing structures. Though each piece of artwork is unique, one similarity among all of them is that the shape of the individual parts in the artwork does not resemble the final shape of the whole. The simple shapes of the parts can be arranged into a complex whole.

Tara Donovan’s “Bluffs” is an example of how one basic shape can be transformed into an atypical shape in the end. “Bluffs” is only made from translucent plastic round buttons and glue. By carefully positioning the buttons, Donovan miraculously turns them into a beautiful coral reef. She glues the buttons in a way that makes it seem as if the coral reef is swaying slightly. Donovan basically pieces together many symmetrical parts into a huge mass of asymmetry- a coral reef. It is constructed so realistically that a person who is looking at “Bluffs” from a distance might have difficultly seeing that it is purely composed of round buttons.

Teresa Agnew’s “Portrait of a Textile Worker” also utilizes one shape to create an entirely different work of art. She uses 30,000 rectangular clothing labels to make a mosaic-like portrait of a female textile worker. Even though the shape of the whole artwork is still rectangular, the portrait clearly displays a number of different shapes. Agnew can turn the rigid edges of labels into soft shapes, such as the oval shaped face of the woman in the portrait. The woman’s arm and fingers also look natural rather than straight and angular like the labels. Agnew manipulates the rectangular labels by stitching them in a curved manner to achieve a natural look for the woman and even the flowing piece of fabric that she is sewing.

Soyeon Cho’s “Self-Portrait 2” unites two contrasting shapes into a graceful work of art. Cho uses plastic forks and q-tips to make a grand, white flower. The forks are the basis of the petals, while the q-tips make up the pistil. Even though each fork has sharp edges, Cho combines them in a way to make the sharp edges appear minimal. Cho actually makes the petals appear soft like how Agnew makes her portrait look soft. One can see that the flower is composed of a mixture of sharp forks and round q-tips, but it nonetheless still looks like a flower.

Similarly, the shape of the glasses in Stuart Haygarth’s “Spectacle” does not really affect his work as a whole. His waterfall-like chandelier consists of 1020 pairs of multicolored plastic frame spectacles and some wires to hold the glasses together. It is impressive that taking a quick glance at Haygarth’s work immediately makes it apparent that it is a type of chandelier, even though the composition of it is highly unusual. It is the shape of the structure as a whole that makes it easily identifiable as a chandelier. For instance, the multiple layers of the frames slightly overlapping each other resemble the layers of a chandelier with long, rectangular crystals.

Overall, Donovan, Agnew, Cho, and Haygarth all have the gift of manipulating and arranging objects to form masterpieces that do not always relate to the objects. The shapes of the parts are noticeable, but one tends to look at the shape of the whole, which is quite different from the shape of the parts. Therefore, the shapes of the components of a whole do not have a large effect on the general feeling of the whole.