Trip the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum I went to for class was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. An exhibit that I found interesting was called “Surface Tension: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection”. The exhibit was full of many works by various artists.

The first piece that caught my eye was called Photo Transformation by Lucas Samaras. The piece is a picture of a fist in front of a distorted image of a face and upraised arm. I saw this picture immediately because of the color scheme. It is a dark picture with a lot of dark reds, purples, and black. The piece looks like a picture of a psychedelic monster from a movie or show. The fist that is put in front of the image is in a spot where it looks like the mouth of the image. I would assume that this was strategically placed there to appear this way. It really takes you a second look to realize that it is in fact a fist. The background image is very unfocused and kind of hard to make out. When you look intently, you see the detail of the fist and how different it really looks from the rest of the piece of artwork. When you sit and look at the piece, it is very obvious that the fist is simply inserted in front of the image, but if you were just walking by and gave it a glance, you would think it was the mouth of the face in the image. After looking at the image for a time, the figure in the picture looks to be in a relaxed state, with the head resting on the arm. What appears to be a dark and eerie picture is quite relaxing when you take a longer look at it.



Another interesting piece of artwork that I liked was called Sole of Tennis Shoe by Jungjin Lee. It is a very dull picture of the bottom of a tennis shoe in different shades of gray. This piece doesn’t look like a footprint like you would usually see displaying the bottom on of shoe. It looks like the artist almost had a view from underneath the surface that the shoe was on. It appears this way because if you look you can see other parts of the shoe, such as the sides, going up toward the top of the shoe. I think the artist did something more interesting that simply look at the bottom of a shoe and draw it in an upright position. When I look at the piece, I feel as though the artist had a view from underneath a shoe, almost like putting the show on a glass surface and drawing from the view from under it. The shoe itself also seems to tell its own story. The bottom is very faded, so it appears to be an old shoe. The heel and sole are both faded and seems to have lost mostly all the gripping and pattern on the bottom of the shoe. It’s pretty clear that this particular shoe has been around for a long time. In my opinion, the shoe fits this particular artwork. The picture is dull and uses only grays, which is perfect for the seemingly old, dull faded shoe.


The last piece of artwork I want to comment on is a piece titled Touch of Evil by Miguel Rio Branco. This picture is pretty tough to look at for a long period of time. The title of it fits perfectly, because it does seem to be sort of an evil character from a movie. It left me wondering why the face was drawn like this. Judging from the title, it seems as though its purpose was to make it look more evil. When you look at the face, you can make out one eye, the other is too dark to make anything out. You can barely see a nose and mouth in the image. The use of dark colors further enforces that this piece is made to give off a dark and evil vibe. The long dark hair gives a sense of evil. Also, the disfigured face gives the image some mysteriousness. When I first saw the piece, it reminded me of the character from the movie “The Ring”. The person in the movie and the picture share a lot of similarities. This piece caught my eye because of the darkness. When I saw that it was sort of an evil portrait of a person, I wanted to take a closer look at the piece.