Review #1: Implant

 

 “Implant”, an exhibition hall inside of the UBS building, showed pieces of artworks from artists of various backgrounds. From the visit there, I’ve learned a lot about artists’ different perspectives and how they used their own and unique way to form creations which they believed would fully present the relationships between humans and plants. “Implant” provided me a very interesting experience since I never thought about art being combined with plants in ways that I saw in many of the artworks today. Material and image manipulation creates an interactive world of art between living things and presents different values of artists while stimulating thoughtful insights to the viewers’ minds.

A piece of art amongst the artworks that I saw as I began the tour was two streams of cherry stems tied together by Ian Campell. His artworks are known for evoking feelings of “immediacy and persistence” through materials he uses and the way they are presented. In this particular piece, Campell used his tongue to tie countless cherry stems and made it shape like ropes, one of which was painted red and the other one left as its natural color, brown. Originally, I thought they were just a random design made out of plastic with a form of a plant, however as I read on with the description, I found out that they were actually made out of cherry stems. Campell’s art showed a lot of detail and leaves the viewer an impression of perseverance and that his design of cherry stems tied with each other reflects the existence of continuation in human life.

Similar to Campell’s idea of being consistent in his artworks, Darren Almond, a photographer from the United Kingdom, composed a picture of waterfalls that also gives viewers the feeling of consistency and persistence. He took this picture after hours and hours of studying the environment and testing his camera with multiple scenes. As the description puts it, the “resulting photograph goes beyond what the eyes can naturally see, creating a mystical, romantic image”. Even though he manipulated some parts of his image to make the final picture exquisite, the underlying consistency of the picture provides viewers a sense of comfort aside from what is happening around them. Both Campell and Almond uses their works to show consistency in life. Almond uses waterfalls to show that life continues to flow as time goes by, while Campell’s cherry stems mirrors the fact that everything in life are interconnected with one another in different ways. I believe both artists have successfully linked different elements of human lives and plants together through their artworks.

Another interesting piece of art in the gallery was a film made by Dennis Oppenheim called “Compression Fern”. The film records Oppenheim squeezing a whole plant into one of his hands and fitting it all together inside of his fist. This piece of art presents how easily plants can be made and destroyed by a person’s hand, which also explains how life can be easily created and destroyed by humans as well. John O, an artist who made plants using film strips and tape, manipulated his materials into artificial stems and leaves that indeed, looked like a real plants. He rolled up some small segments of film and taped them to a specific direction so they looked like stems and bended other film strips to form leaves. O’s art symbolizes how human life can be shaped to follow a certain direction and how changing the form of something, in this case it’s the film strips, can new creations be easily built. These two artists manipulated their materials to represent the idea of creation and destruction of plants and life by human hands.

All of these artists manipulated different materials and elements to depict the relationship which they believe is true between the plants and humans. They bridged the connection of life in plants with humans’ lives through their artworks. And from observing their creations, viewers like me can now understand some of the unique perspectives and values artists’ possess. 

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