Lights, CAMera, ARTion!

I'm not a huge contemporary art fan as I have a hard time interpreting visual material, but I thoroughly enjoyed the Limited Visibility exhibit at CAM Raleigh. I loved how many different mediums were presented. Art pieces ranged from visual, to video, to auditory, and even participatory! I found a lot of meaning in the historical and cultural contexts of the pieces, as explained by our tour guide, but had a difficult time connecting the pieces to anything outside of the literal.

That is...except for this one piece. A piece comprised of 169 acrylic painted rectangles, assembled on two walls. Blind self portrait listening to the beetles while scratching a notched stick so to invoke, the universal magic of the power of destruction by Abraham Cruzvillegas, assembled in the CAM museum by various staff members in 2013.

This was the second piece we were introduced to by our lovely tour guide. When I first saw it, I could barely contain my eye roll. It was so stereotypically contemporary. I mean, anyone can slap up some square pieces of paper, give it a weird, entirely too long title, and call it art, right? 

Contemporary Art at its finest, ladies and gents.

See? I did it right here!

My sketch of the piece. Just call me Picasso. Or...Abraham Cruzvillegas.

But then the tour guide explained what was behind the piece.

Literally.

Every one of those rectangular sheets contains some sort of image, word, or object behind it. Of course...you can't see any of them.

Trust me...I tried.

But what does this piece mean? I looked to the title for an explanation and got stuck on the word "self-portrait". That's when I started drawing connections between the piece and people. 

If you look at the color of the acrylic paint used in the exhibit next to Abraham Cruzvillegas, it's pretty close to the color of his skin. In my interpretation, all of these rectangular sheets represent a person. All of the things on the back of the sheets represent the secrets that people hold inside of them. 

If you look closely, you can see that some of the sheets are drooping awkwardly from the nails they are secured by. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but it made me think of the heaviness of secrets and how they weigh us down. 

Our tour guide claimed to have helped assemble this work of art, and gave us some insight as to what secrets these rectangles were hiding. The secrets ranged from an image of trees to a sugar packet. These objects aren't really of any importance, yet I still had a deep desire to flip over every one of those sheets just to discover what rested on the other side. 

People hunger in this way for knowledge of others as well. When you find out someone has a secret, you immediately want to know what it is. And it bothers you constantly until you find out. Maybe you have a "tour guide" in your life who can shed some light on the situation, but you'll never be 100% sure if he or she is giving you factual information. And you'll never receive the whole story. 

Maybe the piece is trying to tell us that is okay. That we should just take some things for what they are. Accept what is known and given to us.  I mean the artist did say he was listening to the Beatles (Beetles?), right?

As stated previously, this piece was assembled by various staff members of the museum. Did this change or influence the message in any way? Would I have gotten a different meaning from the piece if it weren't arranged across the corner of two walls? What if the acrylic rectangles had been a different color?

All very interesting questions (secrets?) to which we'll never know the answer! Maybe we should just Let It Be Go.