the sea x love

Category: art

  • quarantine queue

    I’m about a week in quarantine and I’m doing okay. Physical health wise, I’m perfectly fine (beyond allergies) but I was incredibly worried about 3 days because my dog, Daisy, is extremely ill and we thought we were going to have to put her down. Turns out she’s recovering a bit and has gained some weight. This part of the reason I stopped posting halfway through last week. However, all is better now and I’ve been able to enjoy on some quality TV shows and films! Check out my list below of the premium video content I’ve enjoyed and what I’m planning to watch…

    1. Contagion…lol I’m just kidding 😊
    2. Four Weddings and a Funeral (the hulu series) I finished this show Sunday morning. It was so cute and I absolutely loved it, clichés and all.  If you’re in the mood for a sweet rom-com series this is series for you.
    3. The Sacrifice (director: Andrei Tarvosky) (currently on Criterion Channel, which I highly recommend if you’re looking for more foreign and art house films). Andrei Tarvosky is one of my favorite directors. I love The Stalker (one of my favorite films) and the Sacrifice is no disappointment. It’s about a family trying to avert the end of the world.
    4. Little Woods (director: Nia DaCosta) (hulu), I’m looking forward to Nia DaCosta’s Candyman this summer but before I see it want to see her other film Little Woods.
    5. Ares (Netflix), this Dutch show was so good and I’m excited to for the next season. It’s dark and a bit gory but touches on race and class in the Netherlands, which I enjoyed.
    6. The Twilight Zone. I’ve already seen every episode of the original but it’s still good to revisit this show. It’s a classic for a reason.
    7. Planet Earth and the Blue Planet (all seasons) sometimes you just need some feel-good images to cleanse your eyes and mind.
    8. Cleo 5 to 7 (director: Agnes Varda) on criterion possibly also on kanopy. Agnes Varda was a fantastic director and has such a beautiful eye (which is why I also love Andrei Tarvosky, all of his films are so beautiful).
    9. Where Green Ants Dream (director: Werner Herzog) on criterion. I’m not sure why I really like this film but I do.
    10. My Josephine (director: Barry Jenkins) on criterion. This is such a beautiful and emotional short.

  • 2019 art reflection

    • bacalo brandada, roastedmushrooms, pedero ximenez
      bacalo brandada, roastedmushrooms, pedero ximenez
    • paella negra squid ink, uni, ikura, gamba
    • txuleta tomahawk koji, sal de algas
    • crema catalana- chocolate ganache, espuma quemada

    Reflection is important, and it’s never too late to reflect even if that reflection comes 3 months later than expected. I want to take today to reflect on my favorite art from 2019.

    Exhibition: It’s a tie between Wes Anderson’s exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Basquiat exhibition at the Guggenheim, and Ancient Nubia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

    VR: nothing ☹. I experienced no VR in 2019 which is quite sad. I love VR and think it has an extremely promising future. The last VR experience I had was Carne y Arena in DC, which if you ever have the chance to experience, I highly recommend it. It takes immersion to a new level and integrates the physical world with the virtual. If I had the resources and time last year, I would have visited Alexey Marfin’s Kowloon Forest which showed in Hong Kong over the summer.

    artist (painter): Oliver Lee Jackson

    artist (sculptor): Simone Leigh

    landscape: Roberto Burla Max at the Botanical Gardens

    architecture: tie between the honey room at the Phillips Collection and palm haus in Wien

    meal: NYE at Pagu (see some photos above); I really love prix fixe dinners and one of my goals for this year is to go to more prix fixe dinners and interesting restaurants

    museum: Museum of the Palestinian People

    film: 3 way tie between parasite, us, and werk ohne autor (US title: never look away). I loved all 3 of these films for different reasons that I will discuss at a later date. I know some of y’all will drag me for not saying ari aster’s midsommar since I was pretty morose on halloween when I missed out on the director’s cut screening and I droned on about midsommar months before it showed, but eh I was slightly underwhelmed.

  • phillips collection

    Van Gogh’s House at Auvers

     A few weeks ago, I visited the Phillips Collection in DC. It is the first modern art museum in the US. I was absolutely taken aback, even considering that they were in the process of installing new exhibitions (which I am over the moon to see). I checked this place out for a few reasons but its biggest draw was its proximity to my hotel. I was in DC for work so I had limited free time. I am also a huge fan of smaller art museums, one of my all-time favorite museums is the Berggruen Museum in Berlin. I also love modern/contemporary art, I definitely lean more towards sculpture but I’m down for some good 2D art. While there were many beautiful paintings, my favorites were the Wolfgang Laib’s Wax Room, Per Kirkbey’s untitled works, and Van Gogh’s House at Auvers; to be fair I’m a sucker for Van Gogh so if his work is present then I’m definitely going to include it.

    Wolfgang Laib’s Wax Room

    For brevity, I’m only going to discuss one of these works—Wolfgang Laib’s Wax Room. As far as immersive and thought-provoking built artistic environments go this is tied with/second to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y arena VR experience. There is nothing quite like the Wax Room. It’s about a 5ft by 3ft by 9ft room covered in beeswax and illuminated with a single lightbulb. It smells warm and slightly sweet but also very waxy. The walls are kind of sticky but it feels extremely cozy. The way that sound moves about the room is also pretty interesting as noise and sound immediately stop. There was no echo or reverberation. I couldn’t help but imagine the amount of work and energy the bees who produced this wax had to expend to create it. It is also worth thinking about the amount of work people had to expend to harvest and process the wax into something usable. It would be unfair for me to also not mention that this room reminded me of time in Colombia, my childhood, and my design work which has focused on bees and sustainability in the past.

    Per Kirkeby
    Per Kirkeby

  • blaschkas glass sea creatures

    A few months ago, I went to Wien to visit some art museums (mostly to see Wes Anderson’s exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum) and practice my German! This was my second trip to Austria but my first-time visiting Vienna. While I saw many amazing works of art and fragments of history, I want to focus on two sets of works that really blew me away—the Blaschka glass flowers and sea creatures. The Blaschkas were a father-son glass artist duo native to Czech-German borderland. They sold thousands of these glass invertebrates as models for scientific and academic study.

    I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a glass artist but my foray into glassblowing has deepened my appreciation of glass art and the skill required to produce such realistic and proportionally accurate replicas. Harvard also has a collection of their sea creatures and commissioned the infamous glass flowers, but I hadn’t seen the glass flowers before visiting Vienna. Both of these collections are breathtaking and so realistic, I am absolutely awestruck. These models are both art and scientific models, and quite honestly, these photos don’t do them justice.

  • Oliver Lee Jackson Recent Works (National Gallery of Art//DC)

    I stumbled upon this exhibition. If you follow me on Instagram, you would think I’m this super artsy person and while I have developed an appreciation for art and what it reveals. I wasn’t always into art. I just didn’t think about it much growing up because I was more focused on science and literature but then I noticed the beauty and history in art and design. I also think my love of fashion and food helped further develop my interests in other arts. When I first visited DC in 8th grade I immediately fell in love. DC will always be one of my favorite places, I love the people, food, and the museums. I absolutely adore museums, they’re some of my favorite places to visit and just be. So, the fact that DC has tons of museums and exhibitions that are constantly changing is overwhelming in the best possible way. This feeling is the main reason why I decided to visit DC for a weekend earlier this summer (and every hotel in Maine was booked). I planned to visit three museums: Women in the Arts, Museum of the Palestinian People, and the Hirshhorn, but I ended up visiting a fourth museum the National Gallery of Art. I had never visited the National Gallery of Art before but after seeing some adverts for the Oliver Lee Jackson exhibition on the metro I had to see the paintings in person.

    A little background on Oliver Lee Jackson, who’s also one of my top painters of all time, is a multifaceted artist (he’s a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and draftsman). He’s 84 and was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Although currently based in Oakland, CA he started his career through artistic community engagement such as creating an arts program at Pruitt & Igoe (a housing complex in St. Louis) in the 1960s. He also became involved with BAG (the Black Artists Group) as a consultant and collaborator on multimedia presentations for the African American community. He’s been an Artist in Residence and Visiting Artist at numerous institutions like Wake Forest, UC Santa Barbara, Aix-en-Provence, Harvard, and Flint Hill School, to name a few; and his works are in the permanent collections of The National Gallery of Art, MoMA, The Met, LACMA, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts in addition to numerous other public and private collection. You can read more about him here on his website, and you can check out some of my favorite works from his current exhibition which is on view at the National Gallery of Art in DC until Sept 15, 2019, below.