A Trip to the Rubell

A week from today, I'll be going on a field trip with an Art Appreciation class.  A week ago, I was going on a field trip with an English class.  It occurs to me that I never posted pictures.  Let me do that today.

You may remember that we went to the Rubell Family Collection.  We saw a show that featured contemporary Chinese artists.

I have written a post  with several pictures that's partly about this tube made of rice paper that was crumpled and draped over bamboo rods:

That same artist did interesting paintings too.  Are they more like paintings or sculpture?  These photos don't capture how thick the paint is on the canvas.

In fact, the very paint may ultimately destroy the canvas, as it pulls the material downward.  Ah, the slow process of gravity!

I love this tower made of scavenged door frames around Beijing.

A view from the top:

I had seen this work before.  It looks like pen or paint or charcoal, but the medium will surprise you:  ash from various Buddhist temples.

There was an interesting project done with Coke bottles.  Here's a standard approach, a collection of bottles, labels in different languages:

And the non-standard approach, which involved melting down the bottles into a gooey mess and creating a sculpture:

And this looks like a traditional painting, but it's Coke, not ink or paint.  It must be a curator's nightmare; what happens to this medium as it ages?

The project below intrigues me.  The artist approached temporary workers and asked them if he could buy everything they had on them, and he'd buy them new clothes (which also provided them a place to change clothes).

Then he arranged the clothes and the possessions.  Is this art or sociology research?  Performance piece?

I found an interesting spiritual dimension.  Are we the sum of our possessions?  What will be left behind when we die?  And there's the rapture element.  It looks like these people who inhabited these clothes just vanished, as if taken up into Heaven.

I also love this bamboo sculpture, how it rises and falls as one piece; yes, it's all one piece of sculpture!

Many of these artists use traditional materials in unusual ways, or as in the case of the classical-looking ink that's actually Coke, untraditional mediums in traditional ways.

You've still got a chance to see this amazing exhibit in this wonderful space; it's up until August 1.  Here's the contact information:

95 NW 29th Street, Miami, FL 33127
T: +1(305) 573-6090
Hours:  TUE—SAT, 10am—6pm