In today’s society, luxury and necessity are in a constant battle with one another. We live in a time where luxury items are being valued higher than what is actually essential to human survival. Artists are able to convey these type of political and societal messages in their art, whether it be a painting, sculpture, music, theatre, and many more. The work of art that I analyzed was a sculpture from the spring of 2014. Its artist is my sister and the original location was at Stetson University, however it currently resides in my home.
This sculpture composed of mostly “found objects,” being a plastic pill bottle, paper money, a paper plate, and plastic diamonds. The artist also used silver and gold paint, as well as craft glue. It includes some biodegradable materials such as bread, corn, salt, and rice. The paper plate is covered with many one dollar bills, there are two pieces of square bread painted a metallic silver, three plastic diamonds with a coating of salt on each diamond, a plastic pill bottle coated in rice, and finally a handful of corn kernels painted with a metallic, gold paint.
Its scale is the size of a typical dinner plate, with the objects on the top being the size of common, every day, items. The axis of this piece and its items are very horizontal with jagged contours. The jagged contours can be attributed to the sharpness of the rice, plastic, and the salt. Also, the metallic color of the gold and silver paints, enhances the depth and curves of the bread and the corn kernels which also adds to the jagged contours.
The artist placed the underlying dollar bills in a very symmetrical pattern. You can see that they then placed the items on top to compliment that symmetry, with a face of George Washington facing upright if you were to rotate the plate clockwise 180 degrees. The lines of objects and the lines of composition are thick and variable.
Formal Analysis Art. (2019, Dec 05). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-essay-art-history-formal-analysis-comparison/