NV Museum Exhibit

Mitch Murway Art 381 Exhibit WriteUp Nevada Museum of Art The Beautification Machine was a very strange exhibit. The multimedia presentation was a bit odd to me. I like to go into an exhibit without the artist statement first, and then approach it a second time after reading the artist’s interpretation. However, my method nearly destroyed this presentation for me. I approached the curtain, pulled it back and immediately felt like walking into a cult brainwashing room with people sitting and surrounding the obelisk in the center of the room. I thought for a moment that it would be pretty killer as a hookah and people could be having a good time with it. (ha) After observing the construction for about 15 minutes, I observed what was coming out of the obelisk itself and then I stepped out for a read of the artist statement. My secondary evaluation of the project was that it looked like an interpretation of what the news, advertising, and popular media were doing to our perception in high load situations, fragmenting everything we see without allowing for a true focal point. After reading the artist statement, unfortunately I was disappointed to know that it was simply a method by which the artist was trying to make something beautiful from something as terrible and manipulative as the news and media. The audio was fragmented just as well as the images of the news clips…and played through speakers underneath the obelisk that were in vintage cabinet housing. The obelisk itself was made of many different panels of warped and two-way mirrors, glass and fogged plastic with news scenes being projected into a disco ball that rotated on a shaft that ran to a small electric motor underneath. This created a very kaleidoscope effect on the images directly above the obelisk and disjointed and disturbed images all over the walls. I personally think that the objective was short sited, but I was also impressed that the artist came out with something as unique as this with such a simple goal.