HANNA CHU
A&E Editor
In the past, different exhibitions have filled the two levels of the Frederick R. Weisman museum on campus with a variety of art pieces. However, the new exhibition “AOR” by the Los Angeles artist Lita Albuquerque takes up the entire space of the museum with her one piece of art and allows the visitor to literally walk into the artwork.
“It’s the most ambitious exhibition that we’ve done,” Director of the museum Michael Zakian said.
The exhibit required construction work and took the combined effort of staff and the artist to create the transformation that it has recently undergone.
“There were windows in the large gallery, and we had to fill in and cover up those windows,” Zakian said. Their efforts produced an effect that Zakian described as breathtaking.
Albuquerque takes a thematic investigation into the relationship of everything in the universe because she was interested in how “everything in the universe is made out of atoms, and atoms are made out of particles, so on an atomic level, everything in the universe is one,” Zakian said.
Visitors are greeted by walls that are splashed with an array of colors and white lines that stretch from corner to corner.
The floor is spotted by rocks of different size and shapes, all covered by bright powdery pigments.
“I saw it before all the rocks were up, and I made some suggestions to change it, but with the rocks here, I think it’s phenomenal from the upstairs view,” said Chris Peck, son of Albuquerque.
The powder on the rocks is a signature artistic style that Albuquerque began in the 1970s.
“She would go to the Mojave Desert and put powdered pigment on the ground using the earth as paper,” Zakian said.
These pieces were photographed to document the art because the powder would soon blow away.
“The colors have to do with energy,” Albuquerque said. “The red is the energy of the earth, the blue is space, and the white represents the gods.”
The transient quality of Albuquerque’s artwork is also an important aspect of the exhibition. The exhibition is a site-specific installation, and while most exhibits deal with placement, the artist had to come into the museum to create her artwork. “The hardest part was the wall,” she said.
The second floor of the Weisman contains another part of the exhibit, which is a video projected on two opposing sides. The video shows an image of static snow that slowly evolves into a beekeeper.
“At first glance, it’s intriguing how it’s a continuous loop between order and chaos,” said sophomore Kala Eubanks after she watched the video. The videos are based on a dream that Albuquerque had when she was in Egypt, and in the dream, she was looking at the planet earth, and the continents were in the shape of a honeybee, Zakian said.
She later discovered that the honeybee is the ancient symbol of lower Egypt, and “when she saw bees flying out of the hive, they looked like little particles of light,” Zakian said. And along this theme, Albuquerque “thought it was interesting that the beekeepers look like astronauts,” Zakian said.
Eubanks said this type of unconventional art was “encouraging on a humanistic scale, just to think about the world and the universe being inter-related.”
Students can visit the Weisman museum exhibition through March 26. The museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.
01-26-2006
