City of Reno’s public art pieces

Kasandra Patterson

Art 160

10/20/10

City of Reno’s public art pieces

            The piece of art that’s in Reno that caught my eye every time I go downtown is the Kinetic Metal Banners made by Dave Boyer and it can be seen in the art district down by wing Field Park  they are on the light posts down in that area. I picked them because every time I am down town I always see them but never really think of them as art. I always just thought they were cool decoration.  I really like them they give downtown something extra, it is very unique and nothing I have ever seen before kind of like Reno. This place is very unique, and I love living here and the fact that our town makes this cool statement, with all of our art pieces all around town I think it tells people that we are very diverse and are open mind maybe or so then other places in the united states.

The Derive` (Drifting in french)

the pics I took during the drift:

Representational and abstract

Kasandra Patterson

Art 160

10-4-10

Representational and abstract

            Representational is defined as works of art that portrays natural objects in a recognizable form. This means that the work is more what the eye would see if you were staring at a natural object or scene. Abstract is defined as the less the work resembles real things in the real world.

So to answer the question on page 39 the work that is more representational is the one done by John Taylor in fig 42 it is a black and white outline of a treaty signing between the native Americas and what looks like English settlers it has a ton of detail and is really easy to see what is going on.

The other art work is defiantly is abstract it to me looks like a child drew it, howling wolf is much more open to interpretation and has a lot more meaning to it than the other one. The other one was very straight forward in its meaning, this one could mean a lot more even though is looks like it was drawn by a child.          

i got these images from: http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/mls/syllabi/702/702-1c.cfm
http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/mls/syllabi/702/702-1b.cfm

Art that has the 4th role of the artist

Kasandra Patterson

Art that has the 4^th role of the artist:

 GIVE FORM TO HIDDEN OR UNIVERSAL TRUTHS, SPIRITUAL FORCES, AND PERSONAL FEELINGS.

            The work that I chose was “four stills from battleship Potemkin” by Sergei Eisenstein I chose this because I think it is a great example of the 4^th role. Eisenstein directed a movie where I believe the stills are from. I think what he was trying to say was in a time of death and war we don’t really understand what happens; these pictures are vary graphic and make you think about what our troops right now are seeing and experiencing. The still that really hit me was a picture of the mom holding her son who is all bloody; how many people feel like they have to do that when they hear their son or daughter has been killed in the Middle East. I think he was trying to reveal the universal truths and feelings about how gross, unnecessary, and violent war really is.    

i got this image from: http://www.onlygoodmovies.com/blog/good-movies/top-communist-movies-communist-movies-list/

The road to paradise

Kasandra Patterson

Chester Arnold works

The road to paradise

In 1952 in the Golden State of California, Chester Arnold was born. Arnold’s work always had a political vibe, possibly because of growing up in post war Germany and perhaps wanting to share with the world the pain and hardships that many of us have not seen. The first time I came across Chester Arnold’s work was at the Nevada Museum of Art during the exhibit “On Earth as it is Heaven.” The piece that greatly stood out to me was “The road to paradise.”  The reason was because of the grand piano right in the middle of the piece. The piano caught my eye because music runs through the veins of society.  The art work was very focused on political views and the environment. In this piece, much is going on: it looks like the aftermath of a natural disaster; a broken piano surrounded by broken possessions and in chaos with what appears to be a water main break right in the center of it all. But looking at the painting more deeply, there is so much more.

It could be saying the music and the books and the art is being washed away by our over growth and us as Americans our love of waste. The painting has underlying meaning with all of the things we might associate with having paradise like a piano or having a tire swing and the perfect lawn only to be discarded as if it meant nothing. 

The name of the work is important as well: “The road to paradise” as I mentioned, what we think would be the road to paradise like a lawn which would mean you have a yard. How materialistic objects are the center of our universe. Is that really what paradise is to us? We as humans have a strange view of what is going to make us happy.