Event 5 (Extra Credit)

For my fifth event, I went to the Hammer Museum and attended Judith Hopf's exhibition on June 8,2017. Featured in Hopf's Hammer Project are a number of recent sculptures made of bricks which are materials affiliated with architecture and not typically found in contemporary sculpture.

Brick-Foot

At my first sight, I saw two variations of feet, both titled Brick-Foot. One is the left food and the other is the right food. The shapes of these two feet are almost identical. The artworks were made by using different orientations of bricks. We can see the surface structure of the bricks from the left foot while the right foot shows people the internal structure of the bricks.

Brick-Ball

Brick-Personification of a problem

As I continued to walk through the gallery, I saw another two brick works from this series on the left size of the gallery, a brick ball titled Ball in Remembrance of Annette Wehrmann, and a sculpture called Personification of a Problem. The shape of the ball sculpture looks normal but it demonstrates the importance of other artists to Hopf’s thinking. A peer, friend, and collaborator, Wehrmann shared Hopf’s anti-establishment sentiments and her playful, and at times irreverent, approach to art making. On the right side of the gallery, there is a hand. It is the sculpture which has the hugest volume in the gallery. It also has the most complex shape compared to other sculpture from this series.

Brick-Hand

Hopf may select a commercially available material and employ the repetition of forms so prevalent in Minimalist sculpture, but she chooses to carve the material, creating objects that are representational rather than geometric and abstract. Being an engineering student, I can feel how hard it is to make these artworks. Bricks are considered as brittle materials. It is easy to cut a brick into two pieces. However, it is tough to crave smooth shape on bricks. To do this, one should also be familiar with material properties rather than just art. This reminds me of the third culture we learned at the beginning of this quarter. Contemporary art and science cannot be separated. I would say Hopf is not only an artist but also a material science engineer.
Proof of attendance

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