Friday, May 6, 2011

Art Event Review - Diana Abells' SMP

I went the other SMP's, and of the other three, Diana Abells' interested me the most. She talked about wanting to show the connection between art and physics, through the human form. She started out drawing photos (in series' ) which were elaborately constructed to convey concepts of physics. During the midyear critique she realized that motion was too vital to her ideas for her still images to be right. She switched to film to capture the motion of the human body, and stopped trying to imitate physics concepts. She started creating videos of the human body's normal movements.

The drawings she did convey the natural extent of the body's range of motion. Some of the images look as though the joints are bent as far as they will go, suggesting a strain on the body. The strain implies that there is something stopping the body from moving farther, namely physics. This is a bit of a stretch, but I  already knew her purpose so it's a little hard to just look at the images.

Personally, I think her work connects more closely to movement than it does to the physics behind movement. I haven't actually taken an up close look at her work yet, but it doesn't look like it explicitly screams "physics!" It feels more like a study of the characteristics of motion than a connection between the artistic qualities of motion and the physical properties that cause it. I have no idea how she could fix that, since i'm assuming she doesn't want to explicitly express the concepts of physics she is working with.

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