Madison Brang
Objects of History
03/04/17
ART DESCRIPTION
A segment of newspaper with the title “June in January On East 43rd St.” was displayed on the white wall. On the article, collaged drawings were overlaying the images shown, and then the whole thing was glued on to a board with the title on the bottom. The work called “Ford Foundation Building” by Ukele hung on the wall framed in a cream frame next to the two related pieces in the Air Art collection.
The work was a small, yellowed, and old article with mostly pictures of the Ford Foundation building covering the layout. This work would be classified as a Surrealism piece because of its exploration in the unconscious and dream world.
The marker/crayon drawings collaged over the fuzzy black and white images creating a layered and dream like feel. It seemed, at first glance, to be stills from a trippy cartoon. The pink, green, blue, and purple round blobs were floating out of windows and swirling around the building. They resembled elephant trunks with lines running down the middle of each trunk horizontally. The bottom, top, and left sides of the piece of paper were neatly ripped straight across. However, the right side seemed to be torn. The tares were entering two of the pictures giving it a distressed feel. In the top left corner, a small picture showed the overview of the entire building. On this, Ukele drew many pink tubes coming out of windows. It reminded me of a burning building, and the long, curvy, inflatables were resembling smoke from the fire exiting the windows.
Next to the small image, to the right of it, there was a large photo of what seemed to be either the entrance of the building from a cropped bird’s eye view or an overhead look of the quad. There were four walls of the building shown in this image. The walls were filled with large windows from top to bottom. The main facing wall, which then ended in a corner, had the span of three windows. Then, facing left, an inverted corner met up to a front facing, two window wide, wall and lastly, to a front facing wall that was cut off of the picture.
Stretching over the images were overlapping and intertwining inflatables of three different colors; pink, green, and blue. The blue one came from a window that was not pictured in the image and ended at the edge of the photograph. The pink one flew in from the front right corner of the picture into three middle windows and seemed to circulate through the building down to the two floors below and in and out of one to three of their windows. Lastly, the green one was mostly hidden. The viewer was unable to see where it started but was able to focus on it flowing through the side of the building. It went through windows, into the corner and, around to the other side of the building. The last image, spanning across the bottom, has a single purple inflatable approaching a woman with the building in the background.
After making all of these observations, I read the plaque which explained that the forms drawn were a mock of corporate architecture. Also, this work was playing on the restrictions of Modernism and parameters between media. She has referred to her electromagnetic blobs, which are plush and attract and repel each other, as “joyfulness, optimism, social participation, and environmentalism.”
I believe that the system Ukele is trying to make visible is the elements in the air produced by the people and structures around us. She created the flowing inflatables to show the vibes in the air. She might also be critiquing consumerism and architecture in the worlds of big corporations. She does this by flowing the joy and energy through the building and showing that peace and happiness can be found anywhere and we don’t have to conform to our surroundings.
