Not for the easily offended : Part 2

In our Visual Language & Culture class we learned about 4 different religions, Western Christianity, Islamic, Hinduism & Buddhism. We had to use at least two religions to represent & then find a way to contrast our religions of choice.

I chose Western Christianity & Hinduism.

The left side represents Western Christianity & the right represents Hinduism.
Starting from the bottom up, I chose a red pot to represent love. I feel that when we're born we're filled w/love & innocence from there we grow & begin to chose our own path, meaning Religion. As we grow we decide who we are & what religion, if any, that compliments our morals.
The images are hanging from balance beams. Ganesh is a Hindu god. Hindu use bright colors & drape gold, jewels, fruit juice, goat milk the list goes on, to show respect for their gods. If they see an image in the middle of nowhere they will walk up to the image & wave so the god can "see" them & help them reach afterlife. It's quite impressive.
I chose to surround Ganesh with glitter to represent the "glowing" effect from receiving such high praise. Ganesh even though oversized he is balanced on his tray & the ropes that are holding him up are made of gold.

Now onto Western Christianity.

To begin I made the "rope" represent the crown that Jesus wore during his crucifixion. As the Jews did to Jesus, society mocks Christianity in every day life. The balance plate is made from an Easter egg. Inside the egg is a Christmas tree & the bark of the tree is a Cross. In my eyes Christianity has become a glorified Hallmark holiday that reflects on all that has to do w/money & greed rather than faith. So society puts more effort & "faith" into Easter eggs & chopped down tress to adore with jewels & gold to pronounce that we're praising & celebrating the birth of Jesus. When in fact, we're keeping with our greed tendencies & put all effort into outdoing one another & buying materialistic items to show our love for one another. With all this negative energy Western Christianity is unbalanced & struggles to hold together pure faith. So rather than shining with positive energy the religion is consumed with dingy yellow to pronounce its fading faith.

Wherever the wind takes us...

That is, if the wind was named Miah. :/ Last week after presenting our sacred/profane piece our instructor Miah reviled that we would be visiting Downtown Art Walk & also announced that there would be a New Years celebration in Chinatown so essentially we could walk right over after the exhibit. Cool beans. Not only was I really excited about going out of school for class but I planned to bring Paul to experience the celebration with me.

Oh the experience we shared.

First off. Downtown Art Walk is the second Thursday of every month. So for a split second Paul freaked thinking he was stuck in class with us. Hee hee. Thankfully Miah had a back up plan. The plan was to visit the Murakami exhibit at Moca. Sweet! I was informed of the exhibit by Leslie & wanted to visit before the exhibit came to an end. Yay! Maybe the turn in plans wasn't so bad after all. So off we went (via Redline) to downtown. Walked a few blocks & arrived at Moca within 30 mins. Niiice. Now as we entered the exhibit I started taking in piece by piece. I'm one of those people that can't/won't pre-judge. You can go on & on about how you love/hate something/someone but I won't take anything into consideration of how it's/they are going to make me feel. In the end I didn't love nor did I hate the artwork. In my own humble opinion the artwork is overrated. It is unique, I'll give it that much. Unfortunately, for myself the uniqueness begins to drown in Murakami's repetitiveness. Not all pieces fell victim to this display. One of my particular favorites...

This post was originally written on 8.Feb.08. Obviously I didn't really care for the exhibit since I didn't even bother to finish my thoughts. However during our finals tonight one of the fellow adventurers shared his own re-creation of our night together. Even though we didn't join in the Chinese New Year festivities we had fun together & created a bond. These are the moments where you think to yourself, "my life is good."

Ahhhhhhh...

The smell of finals is in the air...

YAY!

Awesome finds all around!

The lovely giraffe pendant I ordered from Etsy yesterday has been shipped.

I bet it'll go perfect with my new pumps.

Not for the easily offended

This semester I enrolled into Visual Arts & Culture. So far it's been an interesting debate about art in general. This past week we discussed : Chris Ofilis The Holy Virgin Mary & Andres Serranos Piss Christ. Don't click on the link just yet...

Chris Ofilis The Holy Virgin Mary

Andres Serranos Piss Christ

The discussion started based off the image alone. Without going into detail as to how the image was created and/or the artist intent we were asked if we viewed it as sacred or profane. It was interesting to hear various observations & after knowing how each image was created some views were retracted. I'd love to hear (before reading each article) how you view each image.

Assigned for this weeks homework we were asked to created an art piece (any visual of our choice) to display what we found to be profane & sacred about ourselves. I took (cell phone) pictures from beginning to start of my own piece. I have to admit as the project came along I changed my visual more than twice. A better picture with my digital camera will be posted shortly but as an exercise for myself I'd like to expose my creation before explaining my intentions.