- Aspen Mays
I like Aspen Mays's artwork because she is able to incorporate photography with her interest in science and anthropology. In her work she shows how closely these things are tied together. Her photographs and installations are not pretentious or serious, they are humorous and simple. In particular I liked her piece, Untitled (Fireflies inside body of my camera). At first glance it just looks like a lime green photo, but once you realize the color was produced from fireflies in the camera the photo seems more interesting. I enjoy finding the creativity behind her photos.
Untitled (Fireflies inside body of my camera, 8:37-8:39PM, June 26, 2008) Archival Inkjet Print, 2008
In an interview, Mays describes her methods for creating "Every Book". Mays stated the following:
"Einstein is such a loaded figure- I think we, as a culture, pin a lot of
ideas about genius on him. He’s the solitary genius, the mad scientist,
the truly original thinker, someone that had deeper insight into the
mysteries of the world than the rest of us. So I decided to see how
many books my library (the John Flaxman library at the School of the Art
Institute) had about Einstein…there were quite a few for an art school,
but the library also belongs to a consortium of all the libraries of
all the colleges and universities in Illinois, so I could access
essentially all of the books about Einstein in the whole state. So I
just started ordering them, little by little."
" I made a bookshelf in the shape of an arc so that I could organize the spines of the books along a color spectrum or a rainbow as they came in. It felt like a fitting tribute to Einstein somehow- to use the shape of the books to evoke gravity and an investigation of light the way an artist is trained through color theory- breaking it down into the visible spectrum (as opposed to how someone like Einstein might think of or describe light’s invisible properties). One of the most iconographic photographic portraits of all time is the one of Einstein with his wild hair and tongue sticking out. I wanted to think of the books as making up a different sort of photographic portrait of the man- without using those incredibly iconic images of him. It also felt apropos of a age when knowledge and access to information feel like they are becoming blurred and confused. I wanted to question what could be gained from this sort of cataloging and photographic documentation."
After looking at Mays's work I think Einstein was right, a true sign of intelligence is imagination.
No comments:
Post a Comment