Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Tuesday

Today Lauren and I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery! The first exhibit wasn't very good. It was photography from 1845-1945. Which would be some of the first photography ever taken.

Elias Goldensky
[Portrait of three women] 1915

The second exhibit was about trees. There were these really cool trees made out of money! They were soo cool! There was also these really creepy pictures of naked people standing in a forest and a caption that said things about how we use trees to make paper and books and whatnot...and basically saying that its bad. It was weird. Ooo then there were all these random rooms that said "Please Enter" on the doors. One was like two videos (one of each wall) of trees and you could hear birds and stuff. It was really dark in the room and it made it really spooky. We found another "Please Enter" door and we went in and there was a video. So we sat down to watch it. It was soooo loud! It was a helicopter coming towards us and it landed and the girl inside went to go wake up all the tree planters...which we thought were dead people...but turns out they were just sleeping on the job. It was supposed to portray how much physical labor and how tiring it is to be a tree planter. Though we didn't know that until we left the room and read the description on the wall.

Ed Pien
[In awe of Her power] 2006
ink on Shoji paper

The last exhibit was random Emily Carr Pictures and frankly not very good. So now we come to my favorite! The Paradise and K
üba exhibit! It was sooo cool! Basically it looked like the picture. There were all these TVs set up and you picked one and watched it! They are people talking about their lives. The Küba one was a bunch of people who live around Istanbul. There was another room with videos of people living in California. That one was called Paradise. Some of them were soo sad! We watched a few. One of them was a girl, probably around late 20s early 30s. She got married at 16 and she has three children and her husband beats her and is always smoking hash. It was really sad. There was another one about a guy who raises birds to make money. He was talking about how he steals birds to raise them himself and how he is poor and whatnot. There was another one that was little kids who I think they were adopted...or with step parents or something. That one was really sad too. The little girl was talking about how shes not allowed to go out to play and how she has to do all the work around the house and how her step mom beats her when she trys to spend time with her dad. Really, really sad. There was another one about a teenager who was talking about how she was able to go to school and how most of the women she knows can't. And she was talking about how she's never left her town and how she wants to. But yes anyways...it was sooo interesting! If we had more time I probably would have watched more of them. It was weird being in the room because they would all be talking in whatever language they speak and the room was filled with noise. You had to read the subtitles to understand what they were saying.

Kutlug Ataman
[Küba] 2004

1 comment:

Tamara said...

Art galleries are pretty much the coolest things around