Event 1 -- The Hammer Museum

A few weeks ago I went to the Hammer Museum with a couple friends. This was my first time visiting the museum, and I was blown away by the complexity of some of the exhibits.

I was immediately drawn to the bright, pixelated colors that greeted us at the Gridwork 1974-1989 exhibit by Charles Gaines. The trees were created in different series. Gaines would start off by using a single color and create a pixelated version of a tree on an acrylic layer that was positioned over a black and white photograph of the real tree. He would then layer a pixelated version of another tree on top of the first drawing. He continued this with multiple different trees, and the end result would be a single cluster of colors, in which each individual color represented a different tree in the series. Below, a step by step account of the process can be seen.

While the colors themselves used by Gaines were stunning, the true intricacy of the works were not obvious unless examined up close. Gaines, in a marriage between Math + Art, used numbers to create a logical and mathematical pattern to his pixelated work. 

Each vertical axis in made up of the same number, starting with zero at the central vertical axis. Each horizontal access is made up of numbers in numerical order, increasing by one, as they get further and further away from the core of the painting. I found the significance of the number zero, which was mentioned and emphasized during the lecture on Math + Art, to be very interesting in this piece as it is the center focal point of which all the other numbers in the piece are determined.

As we walked further through the exhibit, I saw that Gaines had expanded his work with numbers into other forms of art. In his work Faces, Gaines employed a similar technique as with the trees, starting off with a black and white picture of his subject. Next, he used negative space to outline the facial features of his subjects and then compiled all of the outlines in a series into one picture. The pixels were also coded with numbers and the compiled pictures on the very right used numbers to distinguish the facial features by subject.

The Hammer Museum also had on display many other fascinating exhibits that ranged anywhere from medieval portraits to contemporary collections. It was such a great experience and I would encourage anyone, despite their level of interest in the subjects, to come check it out!