La Caja

Today, I got the opportunity to go visit Mexic-Arte Museum. It is a contemporary art museum that is in Austin for a limited time. The main exhibit was called la caja, by Martha Papadimitriou. This work of art was literally a box split into different rooms. It was three "floors" tall and reminded me a lot of a doll house. Inside of this box was miniature pieces of art (the largest piece was only 7 inches tall, and it looked humongous compared to the other pieces!), including very intricate paintings and statues. I was very taken by this piece of art and asked the woman that worked there to tell me more about it. She told me that the artwork came from Mexico City and that the woman who put it together collected small pieces of art from all around Mexico to place inside it. You could spend all day looking at this piece of art, and still find something new to look at if you came back the next day! Along with la caja, there were many other pieces of art. In the front of the museum, there were many paintings. A few of my favorites were Antartic by Teresa Zimbron, Heaven and Earth, II by Jose Fors, and Tetragram by Octavio Moctezuma. Antarctic was one of the first paintings I came across. It is the first painting out of the whole room that captivated me. It looked like there were hundreds of pieces of ice that had all broken up from eachother. In a random spot in the painting, there was a man standing on one of the pieces of ice. It was so far away though, that you could barely see him. I think the reason I was pulled into this painting was because of the isolation of the man, and the fact that he was such a small piece of such a large painting. I caught myself looking at the painting, Tetragram, for many minutes. It was an abstract piece that really played with your mind. The painting was very three dimensional. I actually had to look at it from the side to make sure there wasn't anything else making the painting look so 3-D. The last painting, Heaven and Earth II, was very interesting. I don't know why I liked it so much, but the oddity of it caught my eye. It was a large silver pear. Behind it, there were several pears, of all shapes and sizes, that were neon colors. I really liked my trip to the museum. I have never been to an art museum before, and am very glad I made the time to visit it. I would recommend anyone to go visit the Mexic-Arte museum. It will be well worth your time and effort!