Primary Colors: An Exhibition of a Young Boy

I walked into Finnegan’s Toy Store in downtown Portland earlier this month to try to gather some ideas for this exhibition. As I entered the store, my heart instantly started beating a little faster, a small grin crept across my face, and images of my childhood clouded my vision. Now, we all know this feeling, no matter the age, because the reality is, we were all little kiddos at one time, and nothing can ever replace that feeling.

Primary Colors, as the tile suggests, reflects the busyness and imagination of young children. I wanted to portray a sense of innocence and simplicity. Additionally, I wanted to question the sense of value, because to a three year old a collection of lollypops is just as significant as a collection of African diamonds, or Van Gogh paintings. At what point do these collections become valueless; at what point do we realize that our best friend has button eyes and is filled with beans and fluff? To explore the idea of subjective value, the exhibit is handled in a very professional manner, showing great importance to the collections, and images displayed.

Each panel reflects a different interest/ theme: Friend, Bus Driver, Fire Fighter, Horticulturist,
Conductor, Paleontologist, and Sweet Tooth. These titles further push the idea of the boundlessness of a child’s imagination as well as a way to organize the exhibit.

The objects were gathered from the house of Lesa Benton and Laith Al-Aridh on Caruthers Street in SE Portland and the photos were taken on site as well. All of the objects date from 2006 to present. The toys are wired onto the panels for easy removal and return. Additionally, having them wired on further dissolves the toys real meaning and purpose. It also instills the theme that the objects are being displayed in the utmost importance - as if the toys are still in their original packaging.

While viewing the exhibition, you will hear portions of my interview with Aden, the main subject of the display. While they are informal, and more of background noise, I enjoy the childlike, innocence it adds to the strictly visual display.


Exhibit Catalog

Panel One: Friend

Plastic horse collection
Dog caricature
Photo portraits of old friends
Chopsticks/ Bug Pincher

Panel Two: Bus Driver

Trimet Bus Pass Collection
Photo Portrait of the Bus Driver
School Bus Toy

Panel Three: Fire Fighter

Portraits of the Fire Fighter
Fire Truck Toy
Hot Wheels Car

Panel Four: Horticulturist

Jungle Cats
Tree Frog
Portraits of the Horticulturist
Shovel
Rubber Ducky

Panel Five: Conductor/ Paleontologists

Train Sticker Collection
Wooden Trains
Dinosaur View Master Disc
Green Dinosaur Collection

Panel Six: Sweet Tooth

Ice Cream Sequence Photos
Colorful Ice Cream Spoons
Dum Dum Collection

Update: luckily, Lesa and Laith (parents of Aden) loved my box so much that they are going to frame each panel and hang it up in Adens room (that is...after they replace his toys and figure out how to prevent aden from eating the dum dums)

The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away

This article was interesting in that it was an engaging narrative of a mysterious man and his entire life of documenting everything. The most powerful parts of the story were the excerpts from the mysterious man. Automatically I pictured a house in my home town that is basically become a junk yard - no one ever sees the man who lives in this huge, scary, cluttered house, but everyone whispers about him and tries to come up with some sort of conclusion as to why he collects all that "stuff " in his front yard.
Back to the text, the one thing that really sticks out to me, even today, is when the man talks about paper, "These streams, waterfalls of paper, we periodically sort and arrange into groups, and for every person these groups are different: a group of valuable papers, a group for memory's sake, a group of pleasant recollections, a group for every unforeseen occasion - every person has their own principle" (33). This passage made me analyse every single piece of paper that my hand touched, and I thought back to "The Street" and I broke down paper into its singular units : trees, pulp, and ink, and whatever is on that paper oddly makes it valuable or invaluable even though they are all of the same chemical makeup. This is just the beginning to understanding humans desire to collect and document.

Reflection on "Collecting - so normal, so paradoxical"

plainly said, this article was my favorite. I didn't expect to learn more about myself through taking Idea and Form this term, but through our study of collecting and curating, I found a little more self truth. Collecting for me has always been a habit in order to remember the past - which is a key aspect in the article. Additionally, I relate to the "artist collector" that the article mentions. All my collections are very organized and cataloged as opposed to chaotic/ obsessive collecting out of fear of the unpredictable (remember Y2k?). For example, lately I have been packing up my dorm room to return home for the summer, and I don't look at myself as a perfectionist or very neat (my room is usually in shambles) but all my Tiffany blue matching boxes were all neatly packed and labeled with a list of the box's content, and I have to admit I got quite a fear stares and whispers as I wheeled the neatly stacked boxes down to the car. I just have to document and organize. This article, as well as our visit to Cooley Gallery, further instilled my love of curating and solidified my desire to on day become a curator. From cave drawings, to paintings, to photographs, it seems the only way to fully documents history is through images and artifacts.

Collecting

I was inspired by an article in the August/September 2008 Ready Made magazine about Shauna Alterio and Stephen Loidolt, an artist couple who, with their loves of sculpture, collecting, and design, make a very creative space out of their Philadelphia studio loft apartment.

"Shauna describes herself as a super-organized collector. 'I'm obsessed with multiples of things, from being a printmaker'" (ReadyMade, 64). This is shown in the images below: a collection of old classroom globes line the top of their studio wall, and a well presented display of plastic deer add character to the couple's headboard. Their collections are fun and unique, but also very polished due to their specific color palette.

Shauna's collecting ties into the article from our course reader in that, "artistic collecting is relatively open-ended, less goal-oriented" (Collecting, 22). In my opinion, her reason for collecting is more for visual pleasure than chaotic documenting and saving, however her collections also archives things from the past, "[Their home] is as refined as a finely curated art show, partly because the couple is fearless about getting rid of things that don't belong anymore" (ReadyMade, 67).

Their space is very inspiring to me. They are able to pair unwanted, random stuff into an organized and beautiful display.

T-Shirt: The (not so) Great Wave by Hokusai

For our culture of the copy assignment, we were instructed to take a popular image or icon and and use the derivative on the front of a t-shirt and place our own trans formative image on the back. The class looked at examples of the Mona Lisa; one of the most copied images of all time, to serve as inspiration.

I chose to take the popular "Great Wave" image by artist Hokusai. I broke the painting down into graphic, black and white counterparts. I then cut a stencil out of acetate (overhead transparency) and used black fabric paint to adhere it to my white shirt. On the back of my t-shirt, I used the same stencil but used iron on transfer paper to print out images of garbage that I cut out and ironed to the image of the wave. I just wanted to make a comment about humans pollution of the oceans and how trash make the "Great Wave" not so great. It was the first shirt I have ever made, and was challenging but rewarding as well.

Reflection on chapter 5: Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction, and the Copy

The last chapter in Practices of Looking that the class read was all about technologies and reproduction. A quote right from the beginning of the chapter summarizes it well: "Our discussion spans from the early nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century, considering photography, cinema, television, and digital image techniques. We discuss visual technologies from the mechanical to the digital and the impact of reproducibility on the social meanings and value of images" (183). A lengthy quote, yes, but I appreciate the clarity of the thesis on such a "dis clear" subject. The chapter is divided into seven sections: Visual Technologies, Motion and Sequence, Image Reproduction: The Copy, Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproduction, The Politics of Reproducibility, Copies Ownership and Copyright, and Reproduction and the Digital Image.

In the first section, the author went into great detail about the changes that the photographic camera brought to the world. The text then questions the moment that photography shifted from the individual to the social, "Photography emerged as a popular medium not simply because it was invented, but because it fulfilled particular social demands of the early nineteenth century" (184).

Motion and Sequence, the next section, talked about sequential photography in the 1800's. I find it interesting that there was an increased interest in visualizing movement - something everyone in society today take for granted. With many scientific studies on movement, it is obvious to see that this research foreshadowed cinema (which this section also covers). The one point that I find most interesting about early cinema, is that it was designed for only one very at a time (not a whole theater full!) That along can change the whole way an image is viewed.

Following that history lesson of visual technologies, the chapter talks about the copy, first as a highly revered art form in Egypt, and then once again in the subject of photography. A main point dealing with "the copy" is the factor of value. "When works are produced in a series, reproducibility is often understood within a system of limited works" (190) An example that always pops into my head is prints; my mother loves collection art, and as a child I would always go to art fairs and bizarres with her, and I remember her saying (as she was flipping through a stack of prints) always look for the lowest number, and I was always confused, because to me they all looked exactly the same. Walter Benjamin, a German critic, was highly interested in the ideal of the copy and wrote an essay "about the cultural shift to reproducible forms in art" (195).

Tuned Out: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You!

For our third project, we were assigned as a group to make a fictional movie synopsisthat represents our time and then, on our own, design a movie poster that reflects our movie. Heres is my groups synopsis:

Ledger lives in a high tech and fast pace world. No one talks to anyone and everyone stays in their houses. Ledger begins to realize how lonely this life is. He convinces a girl from an online chat to join him. The two of them both decide to turn off all of their electronics and go out into the real world. Will they be surprised by what they see, what will they find and is there anyone else out there or are they the only ones?

I chose to portray the movie as a romantic comedy and used design elements that were common for movie posters of that genre; white background, title at the bottom, actors names at top, and some cutesy photo of the two in the middle. I really enjoyed making this poster even though my hand got quite a workout cutting everything out with an exacto knife. I'm pleased with the results and I think it represents the movie synopsis well.