A resounding ‘wow’. I recently came across this stunning UK artist Nick Gentry courtesy of Wooster Collective. This man’s artistic insight is absolutely genius and just makes me yearn for those undergrad days when I could spend my days studying contemporary art constantly having my worldview shaken one image/video/installation/sculpture (basically any media possible) at a time. I love art. I love art because art constantly makes me rethink how I view the world, how I interact with it, and the role I play within it.
I remember not too long ago (February 12th, 2009 to be exact) one of my favorite artists Anne Pasternak came to Ann Arbor and gave a terrific lecture “Public Art Then & Now: From the Strange to Spectacular and Back Again”. Pasternak was an integral piece of Creative Time, an organization that has been commissioning and presenting innovative art in New York City since 1972, as President and Artist Director. Creative Time, if you are unfamiliar, was an organization that essentially mediated all the red tape so artists could do really significant and huge public works. One of my favorite artists was a key contributor to Creative Time, Jenny Holzer, who would do public intrusions on digital billboards, signs, and digital projections onto buildings displaying truisms that provoke the viewer, not much different than the art of Barbara Kruger (“I Shop Therefore I Am”). One of my most vivid memories of that lecture over a year ago was when a person in the audience asked her the completely innocuous yet complex question “why art?”, “why did you want to be an artist”, to which she replied, “well, art is constantly showing me the world in a new way, just when I think I get it and see things for what they are, art exposes a new reality”. Pasternak completely nailed it down, and although I always had some vague understanding of what art is/does for me, that statement in itself was like a good work of art; Pasternak’s statement itself re-framed my perception of myself, the outside world, and what mediates it.
