Trip To The TANG

I visited the Tang Art Museum on Skidmore's campus in Saratoga, NY on April 17th. The museum felt very welcoming, it was in a very nice location, but did appear allot larger from the outside then it actually was once we went inside.

The first exhibit that I saw was called "Opener 19: Los Carpinteros". The Los Carpinteros are known for transforming everyday objects and common urban structures into unique, inventive, and humorous transformations of reality. They make the viewer think twice about what the actual use of the object resembles/has become. Los Carpinteros suggest complex connections to class, mass production, and consumption within their work. The Carpinteros consist of Castillo Valdes and Rodriguez Sanchez, both natives of Havana, Cuba. They began their collection in the early 90's. The piece the have on display at the Tang is the "La Montana Rusa 2008", it is a full scale mattress shaped like a roller coaster. I found it very unique and interesting. Valdes and Sanchez have bent the reality of an actually mattress and made me think about the thrill and adrenaline experienced while riding a roller coaster, but all as I was actually looking at a mattress. It was a very funny sight to see an object such as this as soon as I entered the Tang Museum.

The next section of the museum that I observed was the Fred Tomaselli gallery. I was already

familiar with his work because we have viewed a few pieces in class. His first piece that caught my

eye was the "Portrait of Laura 1995", this image shows what appears to be a solar system full

of stars, but all the stars are labeled with various drugs and medications, such as cocaine, novacaine,

bacitracin, etc. It makes me wonder what Tomaselli's relationship with this "Laura" lady was like.

It certainly paints a picture that she was a wild girl, who probably liked to experiment with various

types of drugs. The picture is still very unique to me and certaintly makes you stop and ponder at the message

behind the image.

Another Tomaselli piece that I viewed was called "Echo, Wow and Flutter 2000". Most of Tomaselli's work consisted of many many pills and leaves that were pasted to a large wood panel using acrylic and resin. From a distance the pictures are slightly pshycodelic and almost make you dizzy. When you move in closer to the piece, you can begin to appreciate the extreme detail that has gone into producing all these exhibits. The pictures consists of a unreal amount of different pills most of which nobody would be able to name all of them, and they are all strategically placed to form an image, in many cases a very elaborate and symmetric picture. In some of Tomaselli's other pieces he has even gone as far as cutting out images of body parts and letters from magazines to form on larger picture. For example he would cut out 20 or more noses from magazine images and paste them together to form the nose of a larger portrait of a face on a large scaled canvas. Tomaselli's style was very interesting to observe, and search for a deeper meaning.