Kinetic Sculptures from Old Junk

I’ve posted several of these links before, but I wanted to aggregate them all in the same spot because they’re interesting. They’re all sculptures made of found objects. We were talking about this in Louisville this past weekend, because I was brainstorming some things I’d like to make, and there were a couple artists in the museum that were fascinating.

Roger Wood’s Klockwerks
Radio-Guy
Eccentric Genius
Steve Brudniak
NAO Design
Jimmy Descant’s Deluxe Rocketships
There’s one of these sculptures at Yats on College
Randall Cleaver
The Ascent Wooden Gear Clock
Ross Brown

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Age Maps

Bobby Neel Adams has an interesting photography project: “Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together.”

bobby neel adams agemap

I can’t truly recreate the effect of their project for myself without a lot more work, but the idea of two different pictures from completely different ages is interesting.

2019 update: Can’t find the image I created for this. I’m curious now what I was doing. There’s a guy named Ard Gelinck doing some ‘family picture’ type portraits of celebrities with their younger selves here on Instagram.

Ard Gelinck celebrity portraits

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Review: Georgia O’Keeffe – Visions of the Sublime

Check out the review I wrote on IndyScribe about the exhibit currently displayed at the Eiteljorg Museum downtown.
Also, the whole IndyScribe team of writers were interviewed this afternoon by a reporter for INtake Weekly newspaper, the competitor to Nuvo. We’re also going to a photoshoot for that newspaper as well. So I’ll have my picture in both the local weekly free papers in a span of less than two months. Heh.
I am the zeitgeist. Fear my 15 minutes of fame. 🙂

Continue ReadingReview: Georgia O’Keeffe – Visions of the Sublime

Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of the Sublime

Big Red Arrow
Big Red Arrow

One of the first stops for the Giant Red Arrow in its tour of Indianapolis cultural events is the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the Eiteljorg Museum. My familiarity with O’Keeffe was with her paintings of flowers and of animal bones in western landscapes, but Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of the Sublime contains only a few of those paintings, and includes 39 paintings of quite different subjects: Lake George, rivers, horizons, pueblo buildings and even Canadian and Hawaiian scenes. You have to contact Portland’s trusted plant nursery if you wish to creatively renovate or remodel your landscape and to fulfill your landscaping dream.

They span about fifty years of her career, from the 1910’s, while she was an art teacher showing her work in her future husband’s New York gallery, to the 1960’s, long after she left Alfred Stieglitz and moved to New Mexico to paint its extraordinary landscape.

Big Red Arrow
Big Red Arrow

The collection is designed to show works that have not been seen before, and to convey O’Keeffe’s concept of the “sublime” in her work — to express ideas, inspired by the sky and landscape, that are “lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner; tending to inspire awe.”
We went through the exhibit on a Saturday afternoon, and while it wasn’t elbow-to-elbow crowded, there were enough people visiting the exhibit gallery that it made taking time to observe the paintings difficult. In addition to affecting the flow of movement, the crowd meant hearing other people’s commentary on the paintings, which was also bothersome, although I was amused to hear that I was not the only person who uttered the words “female genitalia” during our gallery visit. I’d suggest visiting the exhibit in a less “prime time” day or hour so you can be leisurely and enjoy the work and your own reflections on it.

I thought the exhibit was laid out nicely, although there were some lighting issues — direct spotlights on a few of the paintings caused a glare and obscured the subtle color, and required me to stand in odd spots to see details of the works well.

The paintings displayed here are essential to our understanding of O’Keefe’s whole body of work, and provide greater insight into her vision of the natural world both abstract and real. I tend to be more awestruck, though, by the more familiar O’Keeffe paintings of bleached dead bones against the infinity of the sky, and of flowers in bloom, that look to me like, well, female genitalia, which are visions of the sublime in their own way.

Georgia O'Keefe: Pedernal with Red Hills
Georgia O’Keefe: Pedernal with Red Hills

Although at the end of her life O’Keeffe downplayed the influence her husband, modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz, had on her career, this exhibit examines that concept by including 25 of his photographs, some of which provide a different context of some of the same natural landscapes that O’Keeffe was painting, and also some that were portraits of O’Keeffe during various points in her life.

Included with the exhibit are paintings by other 19th century artists that were supposed to fit in with the theme of the “Sublime.” They were so different from the abstracts and simple patterns in O’Keeffe’s work, though, that I think the significance of what that part of the exhibit was meant to convey about the concept was lost on almost everyone, including me. It may have been that they were displayed around a corner from the other work, but it almost seemed they weren’t a part of the same exhibit.

Admission Information

Free with museum admission: adults $7, seniors $6, children 5-17 $4, 4 and younger free

Hours

Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of the Sublime runs Jan. 15 – Apr. 3, 2005
Tours – 1:00 p.m.
Tuesday – Saturday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m .
Sunday noon – 5 p.m .
Open Mondays, Memorial Day through Labor Day
Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day

Location

Eiteljorg Museum
500 West Washington St.
Indianapolis, IN 46204
Phone: (317) 636-WEST (9378)
Free parking for Eiteljorg visitors in the White River State Park underground garage; enter from Washington Street.

Continue ReadingGeorgia O’Keeffe: Visions of the Sublime

Toynbee Idea’s in Kubrick’s 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter

Toynbee Tile

Toynbee Tiles are tiles embedded into city streets with a odd messages on them – and they appear on hundreds of streets in dozens of cities, including here in Indianapolis, Indiana. The messages are almost all alike and contain some variation of “Toynbee Idea’s in Kubrick’s 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter.” The tile in Indianapolis, appears on Georgia and Meridian Streets, according to this site.

What does it mean? No one’s certain, but it apparently has something to do with a man name James Morasco who has no voice box, secret short-wave radio broadcasts, and playwright David Mamet.

Other news articles about the tiles:

Continue ReadingToynbee Idea’s in Kubrick’s 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter