Although
I enjoy seeing other people’s works at the art gallery, this trip was like
Groundhog Day as I’ve been here twice already this month. I want to have a
second opportunity to reinterpret the pieces in the gallery. I’m glad that
instead of having to do a mock trial, we are going to the art gallery because
most of the defense team is gone. As we walked down Ellis Street toward the
gallery, we left the red brick walls of the school behind.
As
soon as we leave the school grounds, we crossed the street and passed a sushi
restaurant where Mitchell immediately started playing ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA. Multitudes
of houses are still wearing their Christmas lights. As we pressed onward, we
passed an abandoned building that I recognized as the old location of a graphic
design store which has now moved to a street parallel to the one my Grandmother
lives on. I saw weeds and flowers breaking through the sidewalk reclaiming
their land. We saw a professional looking building with the words ‘Kemp Harvey
Kemp Inc.’ on it which honestly sounds just a little bit redundant to me.
Everybody
else looks excited to be doing this. I hope it’s obvious that that last
sentence was facetious. I honestly think that nobody is thinking about this
assignment right now. Looking around, I noticed our flappy feathered friends –
or ‘birds’ to the layman – cradled in branches. As we walked down Ellis Street –
a street I’ve not often frequented – I remembered that my dad works on one of
the side-streets in a land surveyor’s office; my father’s career has nothing to
do with art or English class so I continued down the street.
When
we got to the gallery, I found a piece of art called ‘Alice in NOT SO
Wonderland’ by an artist whose name I don’t remember. Don’t even get me started
on this piece – I hate it; but don’t worry there is a legitimate reason. In terms of composition, this piece is
simplistic, and yet it seems to stand out – possibly because of the shock value
of it. The shock value comes from the use of headless mannequin bodies, and bodiless
mannequin heads. Going from left to right, there is a head that is hung by a
noose that says “Option #2”, the “Option #1” is under it, and it is a box
containing pill bottles. The middle of the piece contains a mannequin body with
no head but a paper bag in its place. On the far right are three heads with
electrical tape covering various facial features to represent the emotions of “hear
no evil, speak no evil, and see no evil.” I feel that using drugs and violence to
explain a Alice’s adventures in a mystical land is very overdone.
This
trip was very ironic as it was supposed to be enlightening and educational, and
I was given the chance to reinterpret the pieces, but I found out that
revisiting a gallery containing the same work twice will not make you re-analyze
something so macabre.
