The art piece “You Who are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies,” by Yayoi Kusama at the Phoenix Art museum, is a pitch-black room with mirrors lining the walls and black granite flooring and ceiling. Hanging from the ceiling to the floor are black cords three inches or so apart with multiple LED lights attached to each cord, which change to a new color scheme every two or so minutes and flicker on and off. When I first walked into the room the lights were all red, and by the time I exited they had shifted from red, to green and red, to blue and purple, to blue and green, to blue, and repeated again. The room is small, and is only about a 15 feet by 15 feet square space with one entrance and one exit. Although the room is …show more content…
I also got the feeling that the artist created this room to let people live a fantasy and escape from the real world that was just on the other side of the mirrored walls.
Now eight years later, my first reaction to the piece was completely different. I felt the room represented infinity and space. The piece is titled, “You Who are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies,” and while standing in the room I felt obliterated. I felt so insignificant standing in a room surrounded by a swarm of lights that seemed to go on for eternity, and I got the feeling that the piece represented how big the world is and how little we are in it. This was scary at first because most people are afraid of feeling insignificant and coming to terms with how small of a piece humans are in the universe was difficult, but in that moment I was forced to think about obliteration and infinity. However, the changing color scheme of the lights made me feel calm and at will my thoughts. I got the similar feeling that I did when I was 11, and I felt the piece was made for people to enjoy in that moment. I thought the artist was trying to represent that everything in life is here and now, and that is what is important. As a species we always try to look beyond things and look farther into the future, but as the lights show the things in the distance are hard to see and only what is close by can truly be experienced
Sun Parlor, a fictional story teaching readers the importance of treasuring great things rather than keeping them to yourself, rather than being worried about ruining its caliber, has a depressing tone. Throughout this story, you can start to see a gradual incline of disappointment by this magical room. For instance, “she was in the hospital ten days. When she was ready to come home to convalesce, we turned the sun parlor into a sickroom, for the stairs to the upper story were forbidden to her. At night we who, when she slept upstairs, would talk family talk back and forth from our beds far into the night, without her we were now quiet, not wanting our voices to wake her if she was asleep, knowing her recovery depended on rest and quiet. But at night she slept fitfully. The sleeping house and separation from the flock were unbearable.”( West,1984,p.494)This passage from the story describes the downhill of events happening especially because of this room. The lapse of the narrator’s aunt shows us that the tone of this essay is probably going to be somewhat emotional. Next, though I don’t know the year this story took place, I know that the setting was in the family’s house. “We lived in a beautiful house. The reason I knew that is because all my mother’s friends said so, and brought their other friends to see it. On the day appointed for the tour, which included inspection of every room on every floor, my mother would gather us around her and say in her gentlest
The room is “shrouded”(dead people are often shrouded in a sheet) in black velvet and is decorated with black decorations>>> black is often used to symbolize death
When you step out of this room to the photography room on the right your feelings within the surrounding change once again. In the first room of the museum the tile is white and thus reflects light, creating yet more light in the surrounding area. The walls go from light and colorful shades to a medium tinted of gray creating a more plain mood within the room. In the side room full of photography the flooring changes from white large stone tiles to wood panel flooring. The opening to this second room is an opening the wall rather than another doorway but instead of the opening stretching all the way up to the ceiling, there is a thinner horizontal plank at the top that is an almost metallically aluminum color. The space is divided up
The gray, bland walls still hold my drawings from years ago. Blood scattered around the room adds some color the dull, grey walls and floor. The only source of light comes from a small, prison-like window. There’s no bed or anything. Just emptiness. In the far corner, a chain with blood dripping off it hangs.
Joseph Rosenblum agrees with the most widely known interpretation of the colors of the rooms. In an essay about the symbolism in “The Masque of the Red Death,” he writes about the meaning behind the colors of the rooms. “blue is the dawning of life. Purple represents
The Room itself represents the author’s unconscious protective cell that has encased her mind, represented by the woman, for a very long time. This cell is slowly deteriorating and losing control of her thoughts. I believe that this room is set up as a self-defense mechanism when the author herself is put into the asylum. She sets this false wall up to protect her from actually becoming insane and the longer she is in there the more the wall paper begins to deteriorate. This finally leads to her defense weakening until she is left with just madness and insanity. All of the characters throughout the story represent real life people with altered roles in her mind.
The moths are linked to healing at the beginning of the story and in this paragraph they complete the ultimate healing process and take her soul away to a better place. The effect of the literary technique makes the whole scene feel surreal. What is interesting is that despite the fact that nothing like this is ever usually seen, the narration of the granddaughter makes it seem like this is a completely normal thing that happens. The moths leaving her body and circling around her room flying toward the light suggests that she is being taken to a good place because we often associate light with positivity or hope. It seems as if this scene is suggesting that only with death can we be happy. There’s a very fairytale like feeling to this part of the paragraph, even though it is sad, the moths circling around the room could also show the granddaughter transitioning into a new person. The moths leave the grandmothers body, leaving her shell of a body, almost like a cocoon, behind are kind of a representation for the shell the granddaughter is breaking out
rooms of the place. A mirror, as old as the history of the humans and whatever other living
So Sasha, on a monetary loan from a concerned friend, is visiting Paris for the second time in her life. Sasha has never been able to properly afford such extravagance and takes the chance here that is given to her. When she arrives her friend has set her up in a room that Sasha describes as “dark . . . [with] red curtains.” (12) Sasha feels insulted by this and continues on to say that the room is covered in dark specs which she sees as insects and dirt. This image reflects the hopelessness of Sasha’s situation because she feels that the specs reflect her life.
On September 4, 2016, I visited the Matisse in His Time exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. This exhibit is home to a plethora of pieces by many different European artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. While it is focused on Matisse and his extensive works, containing more than 50 of his pieces, there are many portraits and sculptures by other influential artists from that time period including Renoir, Picasso, and Georges Braque. Three of the most appealing works that I encountered in this exhibit are Maurice de Vlaminck’s Portrait of Père Bouju, Pablo Picasso’s Reclining Woman on a Blue Divan, and Henri Matisse’s sculpture series Henriette I, Henriette II, and Henriette III.
The two works of art that I have chosen to analyze are 1) Jordan Casteel. Miles and JoJo. 2014. Oil on canvas, 54” x 72” and 2) Aaron Fowler. He Was. 2015. Mixed media, 134” x 165” x 108”. The themes that these works of art represent in regards to the exhibit are love, family, and pain. However, they also fall into other thematic categories. The main theme that seems to apply to both “Miles and JoJo” and “He Was” is Human Experience. Additionally, these arts differ in some ways.
The Egyptian city of Amarna was a capital built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten which was abandoned shortly after his death in 1332 BCE. The city of Amarna was where Akhenaten pursued his vision of a society dedicated to the devotion of the power of the sun god, the Aten. It remains the largest accessible living site of Ancient Egypt. It is a key to the history of the religious experiences of Egypt and to a fuller extent the life of an egyptian. There is no other site like it. The website mentions that the site is in danger of encroachment. This sounds very interesting to me and I’d like to see how the life of an Egyptian was at the time. I don’t know much about the Egyptians, but I’d like to learn more
Another installation is called I’m Here, But Nothing (Kusama, 2008). The viewer would enter a dark room which was set up as a normal kitchen, or living room. However, the room is drowned in black light. Covered the surface of the walls as well as furniture were multiple color polka dots with fluorescent glow-in-the-dark paint. The author once again made used of the distinct color while manipulating lights, to create infinite pattern on a smooth color surface. The dots can be observed as floating in the air, while defying the space within the room and still defining it. Kusama illuminated the room only with ultraviolet fluorescent light; thus, the stickers appeared without any sense of depth, which then is stuck in the viewer’s eyes to create
This image represents the fusing of color and sound by the dying person’s diminishing senses. The uncertainty of the fly’s darting motions parallels her state of mind. Flying between the light and her, it seems to both signal the moment of death and represent the world that she is leaving.” The last two lines show the speakers confusion of her eyes. She is both distancing fear and revealing her detachment from life, “And then the Windows failed – and then/I could not see to see “. Which ends the poem, with her
When I saw the painting for the first time it grabbed my attention. At first I thought it was the beautiful colors that attracted me to the painting, but it was more. In the picture the shadowy men look scared. They looked as though they were trying to run away from something and this lake that forms into this river that is surrounded by tall grass is the way out, or at least a place to hide until the coast is clear. During that time in my life I felt