Nicole's Blog

In the film “Waste Land,” artist Vik Muniz decides to go back to his home country of Brazil to work on a project in which he photographs the pickers of the world’s largest landfill, Jardim Gramacho. His wife was concerned about him going to the landfill for 2 years because of the obvious health risks and she was also worried about the kind of people that work in a garbage dump. Vik assumed that the pickers at the landfill were drug addicts and people who were shunned from society, but when he got to Jardim Gramacho, he discovered the complete opposite. He learned that the pickers were regular people who were just trying to make ends meet like anyone else, and they each in fact have their own vibrant personalities. Many of the pickers were wary of Vik when they first met him, but after working with him and spending so much time getting to know each other, they built a strong connection with each other.              Some of the pickers thought that art was useless and t

Tim Hawkinson is an American sculptor and artist who was born in 1960 in San Francisco, California. He graduated from San Jose State University in 1984 and later earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1989. His parents were antiques dealers and he grew up during the rise of post-modern art. When he was younger he would play with old pieces of equipment and would even  built his own toys. Hawkinson uses common materials (plastic bags, used socks) and even discarded organic material (fingernails) from his own body to make complex sculptural systems. His inspiration for his artwork is often the re-imagining of his own body. His installation Überorgan (2001) was a fully automated, stadium-sized bagpipe pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. "For Überorgan, I felt that I was going to have a real strong physical presence, but I felt like it needed to also have this kind of au

In Max Ernst’s painting “Adam and Eve Expelled from the Garden of Eden,” Ernst painted a detailed landscape onto a tiny card. The painting’s dimensions are ½” x 1 3/8”. Although the title of the piece mentions Adam and Eve, there are no figures of Adam or Eve within it. Ernst uses scale to be ironic. The painting is so small that you would have to walk very close in order to see it, and once you are close enough to make it out, you come to realize the image is actually of a desolate garden. This painting is an example of Surrealism because Ernst paints the vast Garden of Eden on a very small card, creating a paradox. The textures and colors of the painting also make it Surrealism because Ernst painted mainly with the colors yellow, red, and black. Even though the painting is of a garden, because of the colors, it looks rather desolate.   In Louise Bourgeois’ “Femme Maison,” Bourgeois draws her vision of a house wife as a literal house with human legs, arms and ha