Essay #1

      Eyes of Time is a site-specific multimedia installation created by Chitra Ganesh in 2014. The three walls of the installation are covered by three horizontal stripes of B/Y/R paint, accordingly. These three colors mesh when they touch each other. Starting from the left, there’s a painting of a woman holding up her left hand against her right eye and making a telescope-like hand sign. The woman is painted in a blue color and is only visible from her chest up. The painting is only the outline and so her face is the color of the wall. Only one arm is visible. It appears she’s looking out of this circle she’s creating with her hand and in the center there's a dark area that appears to be a piece of black construction paper. This black area is circular, but with pointy edges all around. She is also wearing a bone fang necklace. The woman’s right side uses a tin foil material, spreading out like spider legs. On her left arm, there is a rectangle material used to connect to the second part of the installation. This rectangle pops out with pins/black strips and a copper coil, which create texture. The middle figure is a representation of Kali, the goddess of destruction and rebirth. She is connected to the first figure by the copper coil, but twirled hair braids are fused into the connection. These braids, are formed in such a way that they spell out various words and phrases. This version of Kali has a clock tower head, six arms, three breasts, and three legs. All spread out in the goddess's usual threatening stance. Her outline is black and is painted indigo-white within. Her clock head has textured hair which comes down her back into the braids. On the right set of arms, she is holding a sickle, the middle right arm is mechanical with foil elements, and the final arm is holding an eyeball. The left set of arms, top has a fuzzy wristband, middle is a corpse arm with a mouth where it connects to her body, and the bottom left arm is holding a strong red wire that connects to the final figure. Her breasts are decorated with jewel-like nipples. Kali is wearing a skirt made out of an array of blue toned human arms, which are all three dimensional props that can be touched. Her far left leg is resting on top of an outline painting of some sort of energy ball. The third figure is a purple outline painting of a woman’s profile.  Squiggle lines come out of her closed mouth creating a bridge that connects it to the wire held by Kali, which also squiggles around. This woman’s eye is some type of aluminum plate with a symbol on it. Her hair is an extravagant array of mechanical clockwork gears all gold toned. It looks as if she’s almost part machine. The top part of her hair has some pearlescent stone-like parts to it. The hair also creates lines going straight out, before being barraged by an array of mechanical parts, giving a sense of motion. On the bottom part of this subject, there are outlines of pink flowers painted.

     Houdon Paul-Louis (2011), Kehinde Wiley’s sculpture, is a representational three- dimensional bust of a young African-American wearing a zip up hoodie. The man has short hair with waves and his hood gives the impression of fuzzy material on the inside. The base is polished stone and the man is completely made out of monochrome bronze. Being a bust, the subject is only seen from the chest up. His head is tilted in an assuring manner. His eyes are both glancing towards another direction away from the viewer. The texture of this sculpture would be presumably coarse. The polished stone base is of compacted hourglass shape and is black. Its texture would be smooth in comparison to the bronze. The area around the sculpture can be considered negative space.     
     Initially while viewing Eyes of Time, I immediately recognized the psychedelic influences Ganesh had for this installation. I wasn’t all that impressed with the paintings themselves, but the work put into incorporating the different mediums into one piece was really impressive. You can see how Ganesh takes fragments of all her influences and connects them in her own imaginative way. During her lecture at LaGuardia, Ganesh mentioned that initially this installation was meant to have multiple figures and I think ideally that’s what would have made it perfect. The letters within the braids are fantastic and I hadn’t even noticed them until further analysis. Personally, there’s no real meaning here besides portraying the array of influence and style Ganesh has acquired over the years. There’s many things going on, but all the components do seem oddly random. A trippy representation of women and a goddess. I didn’t know much about Kehinde Wiley before this trip, but he truly impressed. The undertones contained within his artwork referencing the masters. Blending of contemporary and traditional artwork – removing constraints. I thought it was brilliant and ultimately the work he does is really what art is all about. Wiley applies this exact thought in his sculpture Houdon Paul-Louis.  I had never before even imagined a bust of an African American. It just goes to show how our mind is ingrained with many of these old artistic ideas. Tilt of the head showing prestige. I thought it was magnificent to represent something in a refreshing way. The sculpture was well done, loyal to the subject, down to the hoodie.