Kendall Buster Reflection

            I liked the work from this artist more than the work from the other artist.  The light, ephemeral, and airiness of this work appealed to me more than the more solid work of the other artist.  Like the other artist, some of this work seemed organic while other pieces looked manmade.  This artist used cloth like materials in all of the work and each piece was a uniform color.  These pieces appear very interactive due to their size.  They filled up entire rooms, which causes the viewer to have to explore and move around the piece.  One view from one angle would not be enough to grasp the nature of each piece.  The feelings that I got from the work were that almost all of them were either representing cellular organisms or architecture.  Like with the other artist, it helps to read the names of the pieces in order to understand them.  The names give the viewer hints as to what to look for in the piece and thus how to decipher it. 

Martin Purveyor Reflection

            I like this work because it makes you wonder and want to find out more about the piece.  The interesting part about this work is not what it communicates but what it doesn’t.  This makes you want to walk around the piece and explore because it cannot be understood by a single glance.  The simplicity of this work is what makes it really interesting.  All of the pieces are made up of simple shapes that focus on the form and material more than anything.  Some are very organic and look like they could be found in nature while others clearly look manmade.  This work seems like it is made up of scenes from everyday life that have been simplified to reveal more about them.  Some of the work even looks like they could be machines or tools or have a purpose to them while some look purely aesthetic.  The names of the pieces really help in understanding what the artist is trying to express through his work.  Some of the pieces look extremely foreign at first but coupled with the name they start to make sense and relate to the viewer.

Final Collage

Ways of Seeing Reflection

            I found this video extremely hard to follow, primarily because it is so old and also because it was British.  Although I found this video very dated, it was very interesting to understand the mindset and perspective of some forty years ago.  In some ways the concepts about technology, cameras, and art seemed very similar to those today, and in other ways it seemed pretty foreign because of the age gap.  I find it interesting to think that there used to be only one place at a time where you could see the Mona Lisa or any other piece of art, but now I could look it up on my computer or buy a print or postcard easily.  The camera and photographs are so integrated in everyday life it is hard to imagine life without them.

Masters of Illusion

I thought the Masters of Illusion video was very interesting.  I love art history so all of the references and anecdotes about famous artists from the past were very entertaining to me.  The part about linear perspective and how it was developed and discovered was very thought provoking.  I had never thought of perspective as something that had to be discovered, I had always just taken this knowledge for granted.  I also never really thought about artists as being sort of mathematicians and scientists like they are portrayed in this video.  Some of them, such as Uccello, seem so dedicated to their craft its obsessive.

Errol Morris on Photography

            This photographer seemed very insightful and had a lot of great assertions about photography.  I would definitely agree that most people, myself included, tend to forget that photos are connected to the physical world and exist outside of that one small frame.  I definitely agree with the statement that all photos are in a way posed because they always leave something out.  You cannot notice what is not there, but sometimes that might tell more than what is actually included in the photograph.  I also agree with Morris’s assertion that further investigation is needed to really understand photographs because they are so decontextualized

On Photography

            This article by Susan Sontag describes photography in many different ways.  I thought when she described photos as and experience that has been captured made a lot of sense.  When I’m on vacation I take hundreds of photos because I try to record or capture all of the events that take place.  She also described photography as a means of basically collecting the world.  You can collect the knowledge from the photos and literally hold hundreds of photos in your hands at one time.  Another point that resonated with me was that photos seem to be irrefutable evidence.  Many times photos or videos are what catches fugitives so this statement makes a lot of sense.  Although photos seem to portray evidence and fact, like Sontag says, it seems that photos interpret the reality like paintings do because nothing that is just one image can accurately portray reality.