The Light Show

Besides the Monet exhibit at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), there was also a large collection of British portraits and an entire exhibit dedicated to light and how light plays out in certain genres. Several of the pieces caught my attention, including this sculpture using a series of monitors and an old pay phone. On the wall behind this piece was a set of sentences that read, "You watch to much TV. You read too much TV. You are too much TV."

I'm not sure if that's totally correct. While I fully admit that I used to watch a lot of TV when I was younger, I don't as much now. However, while I'm not watching as much TV, there's a certain amount of screen time with other technologies that aren't TV that have taken up the slack and I'm sure if everyone really looked at their own life, they'd probably see similar things going one with themselves as well. Most of us use a screen in our work and in our leisure, be it a smart phone, or a computer, or a tablet. Video games, YouTube videos and the like are constantly screaming for our attention, so this particular piece did hit a note.

While wandering around this floor of the museum, I actually walked right past an Ansel Adams print they had on the wall. How I missed it the first time around is beyond me since I'm a big fan of Adams and have admired his work from an early age. I even have a poster of this exact print that my wife gave to me for Christmas one year before we were even married. Suffice to say, she knew my tastes pretty well, even back then.

The funny thing about artists is we tend to revere what we like and usually, not always, but usually assume that because they are good in one field of art, they should be good in all fields. That's not the case and it's true with Adams. At one point in my life, there was an Ansel Adams show at one of the Claremont Colleges of his portraitures, which I attended because, as I said before, I was a fan of his. This exhibit was 100 portraits by Ansel Adams.

I'm sure others went away satisfied with this particular exhibit. I did not. I have come to the conclusion that Adams was not a good portrait person. I felt that most of the portraits lacked any kind of depth and they were sorely lacking when compared with his landscapes. But, as I've said in the past, art is subjective and others, I'm sure came away with a new found respect for him.

This particular print of Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is one of his most famous images. He encountered the scene while driving down a highway from another photo shoot and had only minutes to set up his equipment and take an exposure. In fact, he only took this one exposure. Later, when asked, he couldn't remember the date the photo was taken, but an astronomer in Boulder, Colorado was able to use basic knowledge of when Adams was in the area, surveying tools, astronomical information, and moon cycles to later determine that the photo was taken on October 31, 1941 at 4:03 PM. This time has since been correct to November 1, 1941 at 4:49 PM. Apparently, the error was due to a number of things, including incorrect geographic coordinates and the curvature of a computer monitor. You can read the account here in a 1991 Los Angeles Times article. 

Perhaps why I didn't see this particular Adams print on my first go around was I was distracted by the hall of mirrors. Or at least that's what it looked like at first when I approached it. What looked like a fun house type of mirror exhibit turned out to be very interesting once I entered it.

First, I had to don booties to keep smudges off the mirrors. Yep, not only did this hallway have mirrors on the walls, but it also had them on the floors and ceilings, making for a very surrealistic tunnel that seemingly stretched forever in all directions. Because of the vantage point of all of the mirrors, you can actually see the booties I'm wearing in the third photo. Later in the morning, I had to walk through this again, even though it was only a 20 foot hallway. I really liked the illusion of floating on air.

I think I noted in my last blog entry that the DAM is undergoing some major renovation, so there's not as many pieces on exhibit at this time. Couple that with the two floors that were solely dedicated to the Monet paintings and there wasn't a lot to see there. However, what was available, was fascinating, in my opinion and it made me want to come back in a couple of years to take in the full museum once the renovations are totally complete.

My next blog entry will be devoted to the Monet exhibit.