Artist Statement

            Abstraction, bright lights, and neon colors are always an attention grabber in my eyes.  With that in mind, and a newfound love for the artist Dan Flavin, I decided to create a fluorescent light box, using the basic materials of wood, paint, and cold cathode tubes of light.  Much like Flavin, the idea was to keep the amount of colors used for the lights limited to just a few, so that I could test the different ways the lights reacted to one another.  Most of Flavin’s works were constructed in a symmetrical pattern, so that the lights formed uniform interactions.  With the idea of abstraction in the back of my mind, I thought of new ways in which to arrange the lights.  Upon sketching many ideas, and inspiration from yet another artist, Piet Mondrian, I decided to create an asymmetrical “grid like” design of both horizontal and vertical lights.  In order to add another element of interaction between the lights, I placed a layer of highly reflective aluminum foil along the back wall.

            With all of these considerations in mind, I hope to have created a piece that is aesthetically pleasing to all who are interested.

Walter Benjamin: The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

            In Walter Benjamin’s work “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” many aspects of art and technology are discussed, more specifically the idea of mass production of the image.  In the early part of his essay he writes about how the production of newspapers and photography led to the inevitable production of film that was accessible to a wide variety of audiences.  He wrote about how as time went on, there was no stopping the technology from continually advancing as well.  According to him, these technological advances had a huge effect on the culture and how the different classes of people were able to interact.  With artwork being recreated so easily, at a much more rapid pace, different classes of people were opened up to the arts availability.  For Benjamin, this is where the troubles of reproduction came into play.  He felt that authenticity, uniqueness, and the “aura” of a piece were completely ruined by the fact that it could be so easily replicated.  Now that the entire population was able to see artwork that only the wealthy were able to see before this time, the pieces seemed to become less meaningful in a way.  Although many would see this as a problem, there were also those who felt that with the reproduction of works, pieces lost their false importance that they once had.  All in all, the unique distinction that art once had was diminished by the age of mechanical reproduction in the masses.