Art has the ability to possess so many paradoxical qualities. One piece of art can be simultaneously alluring and repulsive, manic and controlled, simple and complex...realistic and fantastic. Visual art, in particular, is something that has provided creative thinkers with an emotional outlet and inspired people for centuries. The best visual art has layers --- layers of meaning, layers of thought, layers of feeling --- and can be interpreted in more than one way by the viewer. Art isn't meant to be cut and dry. That's what makes it art: it's not safe. The best artists put themselves at risk.
I think it's important to add here that I do not really consider myself to be an especially big fan of visual art. I don't know much about it, and when I go to art museums, I often have trouble finding meaning in the artwork. That is why tonight, after attending the opening of artist Julia Randall's exhibit entitled Oral Fixations at Ithaca College's Handwerker Gallery, I felt very excited and inspired, because, much to my delight, I encountered some pieces of artwork there that truly spoke to me.
The exhibit featured hyperrealistic drawings that shared a common theme: the human mouth. The title of the exhibit alludes to Sigmund Freud's theory of psychosexual development, which divides a person's childhood into five stages, the first of which is the Oral Phase. As the name suggests, this stage involves a child's fascination with his or her own mouth. Freud's theory goes on to say that a person who has any issues during this stage of life may develop an "oral fixation", or an undesirable quality that results from a lack of stimulation of the mouth during infancy. With this knowledge, I was able to approach Randall's artwork with a few questions in mind: What do these pieces say about Freudian "oral fixations"? Do these pieces evoke a sense of childhood? And why, of all things, did the artist choose to focus on the human mouth?
As you can see in the image above, a large part of the exhibit was made up of illustrations of chewed up bubble gum in various positions. Immediately, I thought, How brilliant! Bubble gum. It ties it all together. It's something that we all use for oral stimulation. Some adults might associate it with stress, others with boredom, but I think for a lot of people, myself included, bubble gum is a colorful, sweet, happy reminder of childhood. In addition, wads of gum are abstract and can be made to look like just about anything. In her exhibit, Randall boldly made the choice to draw the wads of gum in extreme positions, some scary-looking, some dramatic, some depressing. The drawings were made more intriguing by the fact that they were so realistic looking, but so impossible. Some of the positions of the wads of gum defied gravity or were too perfect and therefore could not be duplicated in real life; all were direct products of Julia Randall's imagination.
At first glance, you wouldn't think that these drawings, although impeccably detailed, could really say anything profound about life. As I walked through the exhibit, I found it necessary to look at the pictures in sequence in order to experience the story that Randall was trying to tell. The piece below was the first to strike a cord with me.
The first thing I noticed was the push pin at the top; it reminded me of all of the little sentimental items that I have tacked to my walls, the way the bubble is hanging there. Next I was struck by the sadness of the deflated bubble, begging to be anywhere else but hung on a wall where it doesn't belong. I interpreted this painting as a representation of someone clinging to the past, trying to preserve a moment of happiness for a period of time much longer than the moment's actual duration. After studying this piece for quite a while, I moved on to the next few pictures in the sequence, which showed a bubble being poked and prodded and stretched in different directions by a long metal stick. These images evoked feelings of pain and confusion, which I connected to the miserable nostalgia of the first picture. The last picture in the sequence, though, really got me:
There was the same bubble from the first picture, but inflated. I suddenly had a very different idea of what these pictures meant. They all seemed to span across a time period of a few seconds, during which the bubble had to put up a fight in order to survive, and in the end, it succeeded. Suddenly, the first picture appeared to symbolize a human lung attempting to take in a breath of air, and the last picture looked like it could lead right back into the first, repeating the cycle. This notion introduced a whole new idea: that the drawings in the exhibit were meant to represent not just childhood, but the struggles and triumphs of life in general.
Another one of my favorite parts of the exhibit featured drawings of mouths blowing clear bubbles that reflected images of various things: people, buildings, things in nature. The drawings were vibrant, intricate, and lovely to behold. It appeared that the purpose of these drawings was to allow the viewer to see the world through different eyes...or, rather, through a different part of the body entirely: the mouth. Overall, Julia Randall's exhibit touches on the topics of growth, hope, life, death, and inspiration through the lens of hyperrealism.
Later on in the evening, I wandered over to the other side of the gallery to take a look at the other exhibit on display, artist Laura Moriarty's Scratched Record. Her pieces consisted of abstract layers of colored beeswax that formed visually striking patterns. As I usually do when it comes to abstract art, I started trying to find recognizable images embedded in the patterns. But after a while, it began to feel like cheating...like identifying familiar shapes was sort of the easy way out in attempting to discover the meaning behind the art. So I began trying a different approach. I tried to simply stare at one piece of artwork and let my feelings flow in response to the colors and the ways in which they were combined. I started to notice visible layers, which led to the discovery of different emotional layers. Eventually, I was able to view each piece in the exhibit as a whole rather than as a collection of random shapes and colors, and I interpreted each piece as art on the surface that chips away to reveal older art underneath. The theme of the exhibit seemed to center around beauty and change through the passage of time. Studying Moriarty's artwork was enlightening; it increased my appreciation of abstract art.
On my way out, I stopped by the food table near the door. On it, Julia Randall had placed a tray of gum balls to match the theme of her exhibit. I took one and popped it into my mouth, and as I stepped outside, I channeled the thoughts and feelings that had been summoned by both Randall's and Moriarty's artwork into chewing, blowing, popping, and savoring. And as I walked around the Ithaca College campus, I thought...Imagine how beautiful the lake, the mountains, the grass, and the sky would look if captured in a shiny bubble.
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