Bloodspring, Me101, and Avedon

So, I have just this past Sunday (today is already Tuesday, le gasp!) completed and submitted my submission to the Bloodspring tournament, round one, over on deviantart.com at http://ocbz.deviantart.com. The judging process is now going on, and will be interesting to see how each pairing ends up.

Bloodspring entry for round one, Page two.
carologica.deviantart.com

In the meantime, I am laboring through ME101 Design Project 2, in which we build two machines that move, throw, and catch balls. All with stored energy - in other words, the only time we touch the machine (and we only touch one ever during the entire performance) is to pull a string that starts the reaction. One string. That one string will cause everything else to happen, with timing.

Yes, rather an interesting endeavor.

I also visited the Richard Avedon exhibit currently at the SFMOMA. I ended up with about 7-8 pages of notes, hand-written text that literally covered all parts of these pages. A good thing too, as I will have to write a 7-8 page paper on the exhibit for my art history class.

It was very interesting how the rooms in the exhibit were arranged by basically subject matter. There was a room full of political portrait photos, others with artist, actor, and writer celebrities, and a final room - my favorite one in the exhibit - of ordinary, everyday people.

I found it hard to ignore the plaque next to each photograph describing who the portrait was; everyone in the exhibit seemed to have a compelling urge to know who each person in each portrait was, and even though I consciously tried to pull myself away from looking first at the plaque before looking at the photograph, it was always nagging at me to know. It's interesting how different the impression of the photograph is on you depending on whether you know who the person is; for example, many of the artists he photographed were names I was very familiar with - Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning - but I did not know their faces. I would see the portrait, glance at the plaque, recognize the artist, and turn back to the portrait with a completely different mindset.

My favorite room was by far the second to last room, in which several huge portraits hung, uncovered by glass. It was such a relief to see these portraits without the glass covering; what irritated me about most of the exhibit was how much the glass reflected back to me my own image and the people around me, when I wanted to just see the portrait for what it was. Was that intended by the curators? Who knows. But whatever the case, I preferred the photographs without glass; these exhibited Avedon's concerns with the neglected people suffering from the Oil Bust and the downfall of the mining business. He took photos of vagrants, cowboys, waitresses, clerks... There was a beekeeper, a rattlesnake skinner, and a miner, among many others. The most interesting part was that at the end of these portraits, Richard Avedon's self-portrait also hung in the room:

Richard Avedon, Self-Portrait
(taken from http://enews.art-signal.com)

I spent quite a while in this exhibit and enjoyed it, despite my mild annoyance at the reflective glass. His portraits are very much focused on the individual, and gave me a sense of hyper-realism. While the person was clearly photographed from real life, the photograph itself emphasized so much more detail than you would ever actually notice simply looking at the person. The eyes were so glossy, wrinkles so defined, and every hair or stubble so clearly stood out that it seemed beyond realism.