The Sculpture experiences

This week for our guest speaker we had Amanda Wojick, we learned about sculptures in her lecture, about nine women sculptures, Amanda is a professor of sculptures here at the University of Oregon, she gave us a presentation on understanding contemporary media. Amanda choose specifically Women artist.   It was evident that the art industry is male dominated and it is hard for women to be respected in this industry. Amanda Wojick gave respect to nine women sculptors was very interesting.  The first featured artist was Louise Bourgeois, whose work was influenced by traumatic and vulnerable personal experiences that she went through. Louise Bourgeois believed that art still exists because artists are forever finding new ways to express themselves.  I also found her usage of materials correlated perfectly with the message that she tried to convey due to all her experiences, and what she’s been through, she only used domestic items. The second artist who was one of my personal favorites was Meret Oppenheim, a woman who used her art to support the women’s movement.  Her usage of heels tied up to look like food is a play on women being stereotyped to do domestic tasks, such as cooking. Than we moved on to Yayoi Kussama she used her hallucinations as her influence in her work.  She was known for her usage of repetition and uniformity.  In her installation of matching dress, boat, and background, was designed to eliminate the separation between the body and the material; which I found to be really unique in a way she would go that route explaining the hallucinations. Although there were various artists in Amanda’s presentation those are the ones that stood out to me the most.

For this week’s reading I read “Just looking” and the work of the two featured artist Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois, the theme seemed to be about the experience of viewing sculptures and analyzing them. In the reading the main topic was as human beings do we mostly just look at things, but do we take the image in and try to make sense of it? This reading relates to sculptures in a very weird way that we do not just view these sculptures, but we take them in and try to develop a reasoning of why sculptures were made the way they are. The reading goes in depth with the Giant spiders installations and how it should be looked at and experienced in person to have to have the full effect of the piece; because a picture of these installations would not do the piece justice, her audience must experience these beautiful works of art in person. In relation to the presentation these artist and reading relate to each other because sculptures are made to be experiences, and the article made a point that as human beings we never just look at objects we look for meanings. I guess that what separates us from animals.