We Emerge at the Sunset of Your Ideology
April 13, 2023 - April 14, 2023
@Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
University of Pennsylvania students worked over one semester to present work made in response to prompts from Saya Woolfalk’s class “We Emerge at the Sunset of Your Ideology” at Center for Experimental Ethnography. The class took students through the process of creating a public-facing artwork made in response to the ideas explored in Saya Wookfalk’s commisioned multimedia work for the exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America.
Rainbow Field is a sculptural piece created from plastic stretch wraps, twist ties, and dyed shoelaces. It is in response to the replica of the David statue housed at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, addressing the issue faced by the original commissioner, Wanamaker department store, when the 3000 lb weight of the David statue made it impossible to be displayed within the available architectural space.
Rainbow Field provides a counter-model to the David statue, with its lightweight, mobile and insubstantial quality allowing it to be different each time it is positioned responding to its surrounding environments. It takes the pedestal at the PAFA Museum as a metaphor for given parameters and inherited historical narratives that all living organisms must work within and grow from. As a temporal assemblage and a morphing agent, the pedestal reclaims itslef, challenging triaditional notions of the ideal body and monumentality while celebrating transformations and adaptation.
April 13, 2023 - April 14, 2023
@Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
University of Pennsylvania students worked over one semester to present work made in response to prompts from Saya Woolfalk’s class “We Emerge at the Sunset of Your Ideology” at Center for Experimental Ethnography. The class took students through the process of creating a public-facing artwork made in response to the ideas explored in Saya Wookfalk’s commisioned multimedia work for the exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America.
Rainbow Field is a sculptural piece created from plastic stretch wraps, twist ties, and dyed shoelaces. It is in response to the replica of the David statue housed at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, addressing the issue faced by the original commissioner, Wanamaker department store, when the 3000 lb weight of the David statue made it impossible to be displayed within the available architectural space.
Rainbow Field provides a counter-model to the David statue, with its lightweight, mobile and insubstantial quality allowing it to be different each time it is positioned responding to its surrounding environments. It takes the pedestal at the PAFA Museum as a metaphor for given parameters and inherited historical narratives that all living organisms must work within and grow from. As a temporal assemblage and a morphing agent, the pedestal reclaims itslef, challenging triaditional notions of the ideal body and monumentality while celebrating transformations and adaptation.