In our daily routine we don’t usually stop and think what an object interprets, this only happens either when we are creating or sensing art. When we come across any piece of art we always, like a natural instinct, seem to find a relationship between the object and some known context. And we will always find a relationship; certainly we will find a stronger meaning for some objects than others. In the exhibit Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary we can clearly observe this. All the pieces in the exhibit were created by other objects in other to give then a different meaning. Most of the pieces’ meaning or context in the exhibit could be clearly seen and in others the artist really made sure that we could work hard to get them.

In my opinion half of the pieces in the exhibition you could easily find the context just because of the way it was made. Some it was amassing that the artist made sure that the materials used related to the context that the piece was trying to expose. The piece Portrait of a Textile Worker by Terese Agnew surely did this by using clothing labels to create a quilt of an image of a woman working in a textile company. It is most likely that the artist was trying to create a work of art in which explained what it tales to make all those clothing from the different label brands that she had in her piece. Another artist that did something similar was Sanya Clark with her piece Madam CJ Walker (Large). It was made with plastic combs and it created an image of a woman. This piece’s context was harder to get because you had to have previous knowledge of the lady in the piece. The context had to do with a successful black woman that made her empire in the hair and cosmetic industry, thankfully for us the Museum of Art and Design gave us this information or our thoughts would had been lost in time and space trying to find out what was going on in that piece. With these two pieces the materials had a directly connection with the piece’s image and of course context, making it easier for us the viewer to come up with a nice and clear connection.

Sometimes is much harder to discover the relationship between the object and the context. For example with Reading Chair With Buddha Heads the artist Long Bin Chen gave us both in the piece the image of the Buddha that represents religion and books that represent knowledge to maybe tell us that even though both subjects are not that relatable they can both make us improve our potential in this world. Pieces of art like this one are in my opinion the greatest ones because art should be more than something pretty but it has to make us think about the things that we constantly don’t see in regular objects.

Indeed, every piece of art has to have a relationship with a context that would make us the viewer stop and think at least a bit beyond what are eyes are seeing. If this is not reached by an artist, than his piece is not art but just something of the ordinary.