Museum Visit Philosophical Inquiry: April 1, 2013
Prompt: Create an artwork that provides a new, and thought-provoking, way of perceiving and/or experiencing something in/around/about the Taft Museum. Your focus could be the building itself, its history, an exhibition, or a specific object, or group of items, etc.
For my museum visit project, I imagined the discourse that could be facilitated if one of the Taft Museum's Qing Dynasty vases was paired with the work of contemporary artist Gesine Hackenberg. Working digitally, I used lines to weave the two works together, all the while keeping a running list of possible discussion points that could arise by placing the two objects next to one another (pictured below). As I created the lines between the two, it occurred to me that this could be a blueprint for a real life future project in which items of museum collections would get physically bound together with contemporary objects in order to facilitate philosophical inquiry. By creating these lines, I made visual the inherent yet ineffable connections that exist between the two.