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Beauty at the Cooper Hewitt Triennial

By Peggy Roalf   Wednesday May 4, 2016

For the first DART Book Prize Essay Contest, students in Dr. Anastasia Aukeman’s Integrative Seminar 2: Visual Culture course at Parsons School of Design, in the School of Art and Design History and Theory, submitted their critiques of the Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial exhibition. Honorable Mention goes to Jaya Jankowski, in the morning section.—Peggy Roalf 

Beauty by Jaya Jankowski  |  In the exhibition Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, artists and curators present innovative ideas about beauty based on seven themes: Extravagant, Intricate, Etherial, Transgressive, Emergent, Elemental, and Transformative.  Each theme offers multi-sensory experience that challenges viewers to find new ways of perceiving beauty—a combination of qualities that make something attractive and intoxicates our sense through sign, touch, and smell. 

Nature and mathematics together offer some of the most intricate information available today. When designers and artist combine the two we are able to experience new forms of beauty by considering nature in a new context. In the series Emergent, mathematical processes are pushed to create art that resembles nature in a new form, whose structures and shapes have a natural familiarity but enchant the viewer with the beauty of their unusual surfaces, textures, and appearances.

Neri Oxman, head of the MIT Media Lab Mediated Matter Group, created From Glass, a series of 3D printed coiled glass vases (left), which are the first known instance of using 3D-printing to produce transparent objects. Each of the eleven pieces in the series were constructed by layering tubes of molten glass to create transparent vase-like forms. The vessels, in a variety of shapes, are presented with lights hung over the opening of each, resulting in magnificent light patterns that spill onto the glass display table to createa second series of beautiful forms.  

The Polythread Knitted Textile Pavilion by Jenny Sabin was created from digitally kitted 3D elements, solar active yarns, twill tape and aluminum tubing. The pavilion’s white photoluminescent and light-activated yarns are illuminated and transformed by colorful lights cast across the structure.

Beauty in nature is often associated natural and organic materials. However, in the Emergent section of the exhibition, beauty is attained through artificial materials that are manipulated into shapes that have organic edges and forms. Combining technical math formulations with patterns of nature allows artist to create a new form of beauty. For Sabin’s pavilion and Oxman’s glass, the beauty lies not only in the detail of the concept but is also in the newness of the pieces. The light patterns created by both pieces took something familiar but created it in a completely new way.  

In the Transgressive section of the exhibition, artists embrace forms that are often dismissed as having any possibility of being beautiful. They show a new way of looking at something preconceived as ugly and make it alluring. 

In Noa Zilberman’s piece, she calls attention to the grooves that settle naturally around the eyes, mouth, brow, and cleavage. Age used to be a sign of wisdom and power that was revered and respected but today wrinkles are often considered to be a flaw. Zilberman highlights them with a piece of art that can be displayed beautifully next to natural wrinkles. These pieces are also ironic because they call attention to something that is so often covered over. The materials and finish of these jewels makes them look elegant and costly rather than an “embarrassing” result of time.

Animal: The Other Side of Evolutions by Ana Rajcevic in 2012 is a series of wearable sculptures created from bone white fiberglass and polyurethane that test the boundaries that humans have put between themselves and animals. The juxtaposition of the anatomy of an animal with the human body combines the familiar and the unknown. These pieces obscure the body, thus creating a new, dynamic view of the human form.

Rajcevic and Zilberman celebrate the true nature of the human form by manipulating simple shapes into intricate forms that highlight aspects of the body that are often overlooked. Rather than glorifying individual physical traits that are often associated with beauty, these pieces celebrate unique characteristics that amplify essentials of the human form.

Beauty –Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial continues through August 21, 2016. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, NY, NY. Info 265 of the 334 objects in the Triennial can be viewed online

 

 


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