Midterm

While visiting the art exhibit made by Edyta Stepien, I thought it was extraordinary. Edyta had 3 pieces of art, all from film, and all moving pieces. The main piece was called "Nonphenomena" which was a video that played on 2 full walls. While watching this my first thoughts were that it was a very dark looking video which looked like some sort of storm or the inside of a tornado of some type. There were a lot of items that were visible to the naked eye such as tumbleweed, branches, twigs, newspaper, ect. This piece was very confusing to me at first because I did not truly understand it, although I did think it was beautiful. The video gave me sort of a sad, lonely type feeling because it was very dark and the pace would go from extremely chaotic to very calm, which also  confused me.

 Next there were two pieces that were constantly moving. There were many natural colors included in both of them, a lot of green, tan, brown and grey. The grey threw me off in both pieces and actually made me very confused. The first piece was a moving circular shaped piece that was very peaceful and calming, when I was looking at this piece I thought the artist was trying to show us sort of a re-form type of art.

The next piece was similar in color and movement with the prior circular one, but it was sort of in the shape of a tree/leaf. This one seemed to be more green to me than the other one, it would stay green for a while and then as it would move, the color would start getting lighter and even reach a white color. This piece was also very peaceful to look at.

At the end of the show, we got to ask the artist multiple questions on how she created it, what she was going for, why she made what she made and what it means. Edyta made "Nonphenomena" in an aquarium and used a macrolens camera and constructed material to try and make a natural looking storm. Edyta came up with this idea around 2010 because of all of the hurricanes and earthquakes that were going on and she wanted to use this art to show how humans impact nature. To do this, she used many different things in the video to show human impact- such as newspaper. She told us that she was trying to make us feel what is happening on screen because she has always wanted to identify nature for herself and use a natural aspect with her art. Edyta did run into a few problems such as finding the equipment necessary and the space to show her artwork. She used many different things to try and create these storms such as, hairdryers, her hands, 7 projectors, mirrors, glitter, sticks, dirt, paper, sand. This took her a total of 3 weeks to complete, including editing. This was all shot in real time and she did not want to collaborating it because she thought it would feel different if she did. As for the other two, she did not speak much about them but she did say that she tried to stick with the same meaning- how humans effect nature. This is why she included greys and other colors into these natural looking pieces because they represent concrete and human effects.