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MoMA Visit

To view a variety of collages and juxtaposition positions pieces of art, we, the graphic design course, travelled to the Museum of Modern Art. Inside MoMA, the Louise Lawler exhibit was my favourite out of the two exhibits that I visited for its use of photography and juxtapositioning. The piece that intrigued me the most is the featured photo displayed above. The Red Man and White Flowers are certainly two objects that seem totally apart from each other as the man’s facial features expressed horror, deformity, and a sense of being appalled whereas the flowers were dainty and beautiful inside a thin clear vase. However, together the Red Man doesn’t seem to look similar to the monstrous being he would be alone. Instead, he looks more in awe, the type of awe that reaches towards extreme, but still in awe of the flowers that are currently to the left of him. The flowers also take a more god-like and ethereal form as they aren’t just simple flowers, they are an object that has encaptured the eyes of the Red Man.

Robert Rauschenberg’s gallery, albeit not as interesting to me, still contained many pieces that made me stop and stare for a couple minutes, trying to interpret and meaning behind them. The piece that I enjoyed looking at the most was the photo above, which was a chaotic piece that I believe reflected a time of more arbitrary living with modern society. The woman surrounded in blue reminds me of old Renaissance paintings, a time period where people were questioning the former societal nature of their life while the airplanes and how they are structured emulates the first airplanes, wherein humans didn’t know how to fly and were dealt with the concept of possibly being able to travel throughout the sky. Contrasting the arbitrary symbolism is the modern city and what seems to look like steel in the bottom left corner in addition to the American eagle that symbolises our nation which is fairly new compared to the rest of the world. The boxes that were placed on the collage remind me of the process of discovering something new or creating something new. You have the old, question it, create new schematics, and the product shines as a modern wonder. Overall, I believe what draws my eye is the fact that the collage is staged similarly to Louise Lawler’s juxtapositional photographs but with the decision to use a collage to represent the juxtaposition rather than stages and taking a photo of it.

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