Island Med Student

Yesterday was a great day. I started the morning off with a nice run into Manhattan and back. After catching up on a few errands, Micah and I decided to go visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check out the Robert Frank exhibit. It ended up being a bit disappointing but all was well because we also checked out the Surface Tension exhibit, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There was one piece, which I was particularly fond of. I can’t remember the name of the artist, but he was Italian, and he took little glass slides and pressed them up to every single inch of his body and took photographs of each. He then assembled the photos into a somewhat random sequence for the installed piece. Very nice!

From the Met’s description of Surface Tension:

“Photographs are often perceived as transparent windows onto a three-dimensional world. Yet photographs also have their own material presence as physical objects. Contemporary artists who exploit this apparent contradiction between photograph as window and photograph as object are featured in Surface Tension. The exhibition presents 30 works that play with the inherent tension between the flatness of the photograph and the often lifelike illusion of depth. Surface Tension highlights the ways in which artists use photographic and multi-media techniques to direct our attention to the physical surface of the photograph. Among the works featured are photographs that have been purposely scratched, burned, or painted on, as well as photograms made by placing objects directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper.”

Micah and I walked around Manhattan for a bit afterwards. There were quite a few people out and about. I saw Christmas trees being installed, and there were many Christmas lights up all over the town, including one building that was pretty much covered in them. I’m not a huge fan of Christmas decorations, but I did enjoy looking at all the twinkling lights.

I have this entire week off, which is super nice. I might be going down to Baltimore today or tomorrow, and then I’m going to spend Thanksgiving day at my parents’ farm in Virginia.

Enjoy the photos with this post. A “Dominican Bakery” sign at my subway stop (NOT DominEEcan), the Christmas tree in the Met, and a statue in the lobby of the Met.