Art – Page 55 – Ellis Hollow

The Dalai Lama in Ithaca

The Dalai Lama is in town to dedicate a new monastery here in Ithaca, and spent most of the day on the Cornell campus. He stopped by the Johnson Art Museum to bless both a sand and a string mandala that monks from India have been working on since September 11. It’s been an experience to see them the past few weeks strolling across campus in their robes in the warm fall weather on their way to Collegetown for their lunch break.

The Ithaca Journal has some great photo essays of the monks at work constructing the string mandala and sand mandala.

The Cornell Chronicle also has great coverage of the visit, and the web folks have streaming video of the Dalai Lama’s address to a full house at Barton Hall. It’s worth a peak just for the invocation chant by the monks. I only caught bits and pieces this afternoon. But from what I could hear, the Dalai Lama is entertaining (jovial is the word that came to mind) as well as enlightening.

Running the Numbers

Via Crooks and Liars, Running the Numbers – An American Self-Portrait featuring digital art by Chris Jordan.

The artist’s statement explains it all:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) [the image above] and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to affirm and sanctify the crucial role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

Also recommended, Jordan’s two other online exhibits: Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption and In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss From an Unnatural Disaster.

Anemones in the hidden garden

Click on most images for larger view.

There’s a small courtyard outside the Plant Science Building where I work at Cornell. It’s bordered on the north and west sides by four stories on stories of stone wall and ivy, to the east by a single story, and is open to the south. Below is a heated basement and nearby greenhouses radiate heat during winter. Talk about microclimates. Several woody plants there are at least a Zone or two outside their range.

I gaze at it from the Men’s room window a story above every time I dry my hands. This time of the year, it’s exploding with anemones that I can’t grow at home because of the deer.

I have no clue what this groundcover is that’s flowering there now, but it’s nice:

When your shake too much or fail to focus on your close-ups, you can always resort to PhotoShop filters.

purple anemone

white anemone

Actually, the second unflitered wasn’t all that bad:

The Dissolute Household

Great weather in the forecast. But no blogging or gardening this weekend until the house is in order.

The Dissolute Household

From the New York Times:

â€œThe Dissolute Householdâ€

Jan Steen (1626-1679)

Few artists combined situation comedy and moral rebuke with more panache than Jan Steen. Both are evident in this masterly depiction of an upper-middle-class family partying their way down the road to perdition. The house is still fancy, its larder well stocked. But domestic life is a shambles. A maid plies her mistress with wine while exchanging an obscene gesture with her master. The old grandmother has nodded off; one of the roustabout children chases a beggar from the door. A basket hangs from a rafter overhead. It holds a crutch and begging cup: the future. Art historians suggest that Steen might have used his first wife and children as models for the picture. And thereâ€™s no question that that master of the house, foppish, grinning, and defiantly self-aware, is a self-portrait.

Garden bloggers bloom day: September scans

In the 30s here last night. Â It looks and feels like fall outside, and everything looks (as jug band musicians say) ragged but right on the scanner.

Whites, including Sorbaria (reblooming again this year), Eryngium yuccafolium, Eupatorium purpureum â€˜Joe Whiteâ€™, Artemisia, Miscanthus.

Dahlia, Solidago.

Aconitum, Ligularia, Physostegia, Achillea, Lantana, Chelone, Verbena bonariensis.

Ditto above with some wild Eupatorium thrown in.