Introduction: Art • Outdoors • Travel (Pt 1)

Hi steemians! Feel free to call me Cat (like meow 😸 can you guess what my real name is?) I would like to share with you some of my interests.

art

I think it’s one of the highest application of our mental faculties; it’s a freeform expression of oneself and what one’s thoughts. Art comes in many and different forms: paintings, drawings, music, dance, photo/videography, architecture, interior design, etc. There is no limit, really. By no means am I an ‘art snob,’ but I certainly enjoy going to art exhibitions, galleries, and museums (especially the pop-up ones!). I’d like to first share with you a pop-up art exhibition that is meant to bring attention to the desert and valley’s environment through the display works of emerging artists.

HOLLOW EARTH (GLENN KAINO) – glass tunnel descending deep into the Earth. You may not know this about me, but I am afraid of heights. Once I was inside and saw this tunnel, I felt very uneasy (of course, I tried my best to not show it :P). It looked like a hole that drops into infinite darkness. How far deep into the ground do you think they had to dig?

Meaning behind the artist’s work: gesture that explores the complicated and diverse history of tunnel making, from the secret tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to the common childhood (and Orientalist) fantasy of digging a hole through the planet and ending up in China. Paradoxically, as someone stares down at the piece, wondering about the depth of the tunnel. In this ironic case, art directly reflects (their) life and the meaning, value and power that they assign to it.

MIRAGE (DOUG AITKEN) • house that is made of mirrors. Came here during sunrise (ahh, yes I can be an early bird!) and it was absolutely beautiful – I wish you were all there to witness it; the pictures doesn’t do it justice. In certain angles, the house just looks seamless and can blend in to the rest of the landscape. In other angles, it just alters the landscape completely.

Meaning: reflection of the dreams and aspirations projected onto the America West. Mirrors both absorbs and reflects the landscape around in such ways that the exterior will seemingly disappear just as the interior draws the viewer into a never-ending kaleidoscope of light and reflection. As Mirage pulls the landscape in and reflects it back out and is a perceptual echo-chamber endlessly bouncing between the dream of nature as pure uninhabited state and the pursuit of its conquest.

Let me know your thoughts! Would you like to see more of these types of photos?