Museum trip?
bobodacious (who's up in NY and really should come down to see this with lots of people here) pointed out this NYT link earlier today. Since we have until March, we should be able to pull together some sort of group trip to see what sounds like a fantastic art exhibit.
Artist Celebrates Scars’ Fierce Beauty
The gated garrison of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, with its bunkerlike hospital, is not the first place you might expect to find an art exhibition in this city.
And even if you found the show, inside the National Museum of Health and Medicine right around the corner from the vitrine containing the derringer bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln, you would probably be surprised to see the walls adorned with vaguely Conceptual-looking monochromatic prints featuring jagged ridges and blotches resembling some kind of late-Jackson Pollock experiment on loan from the Guggenheim.
Yet their titles sound a lot less like museum labels than the check-in charts at a hospital trauma center: “Splenectomy”; “Lung Removal After Suicide Attempt”; “Broken Eye Socket Repair Using Bone From the Skull After Car Accident”; “Arm Reconstruction After Motorcycle Accident.”
These seemingly abstract textures and surfaces are actually images of scars, many of them terrifyingly impressive and some acquired by their wearers with great suffering.
Ted Meyer, a Los Angeles artist, made the prints over the last several years directly from the bodies of friends, acquaintances and willing strangers.
First he applies block-print ink to the scars and the skin around them and then presses paper to skin to make several direct contact images, which he highlights slightly with gouache and pencil.
The exhibition, “Scarred for Life,” which just opened, runs through March.
So, who's up for going and when in the next six months do you want to? :)
Artist Celebrates Scars’ Fierce Beauty
The gated garrison of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, with its bunkerlike hospital, is not the first place you might expect to find an art exhibition in this city.
And even if you found the show, inside the National Museum of Health and Medicine right around the corner from the vitrine containing the derringer bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln, you would probably be surprised to see the walls adorned with vaguely Conceptual-looking monochromatic prints featuring jagged ridges and blotches resembling some kind of late-Jackson Pollock experiment on loan from the Guggenheim.
Yet their titles sound a lot less like museum labels than the check-in charts at a hospital trauma center: “Splenectomy”; “Lung Removal After Suicide Attempt”; “Broken Eye Socket Repair Using Bone From the Skull After Car Accident”; “Arm Reconstruction After Motorcycle Accident.”
These seemingly abstract textures and surfaces are actually images of scars, many of them terrifyingly impressive and some acquired by their wearers with great suffering.
Ted Meyer, a Los Angeles artist, made the prints over the last several years directly from the bodies of friends, acquaintances and willing strangers.
First he applies block-print ink to the scars and the skin around them and then presses paper to skin to make several direct contact images, which he highlights slightly with gouache and pencil.
The exhibition, “Scarred for Life,” which just opened, runs through March.
So, who's up for going and when in the next six months do you want to? :)