All tagged color

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

Jessica Hughes and Urmila Mohan
Curatorial Essays

A curatorial essay accompanying the digital exhibit “The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesques” on a body of work by the French artist Claire Le pape, inspired by the frescos of the Italian painter Giotto. This essay places us on a voyage of discovery, to see color as a passionate muse for artists across widely differing centuries, worlds and materials. Through Le Pape’s video testimonials and intricate tapestries woven out of fishing twine we see how color and religion overlap to create spaces of immersive and transcendental experience. Le Pape’s series of weavings called ‘Giottoesques’ showcase the ability of colorful materials to sensorially evoke the numinous as well as reference the artist’s own religiosity or spirituality.

The Prismatics of Silk

The Prismatics of Silk

Alexandra Dalferro
Articles

Silk is so famously shimmery because of its prism-like, triangular protein structure that allows it to refract incoming light at different angles and thus to produce different colors. Yet this inherent material brilliance depends on the qualities of the silk threads and environmental conditions, like the amount and type of light. The author expands a literal approach to prismatics to metaphorically encompass the situated and contingent nature of material, bodily engagements with silks and their colors. This essay renders the prismatics of the three “mother colors” of silks in Surin, Thailand to reflect upon how colors are inseparable from sociocultural, economic, political, and historical considerations of their origins.

Color, Graffiti and the Senses: Visitors and Worshippers at Indian Archaeological Sites

Color, Graffiti and the Senses: Visitors and Worshippers at Indian Archaeological Sites

Uthara Suvrathan
Photo Essays

This essay examines ancient Buddhist monastic sites, now archaeological/tourist sites, and the ways in which people experience and interact with the past, mediated through material culture. For example, the historic sites of Ajanta and Ellora in India are known for their vibrantly colored paintings, protected in various ways including signs banning the performance of rituals. And yet, we find that visitors respond to these sites in unexpected ways, for instance, by placing gold foil on carvings of the Buddha as a form of veneration and worship. The traces of this interaction, both past and present, can be seen in various kinds of graffiti and in the use of architectural form and light. By observing contemporary practices and the ways visitors develop their own experiences, one can suggest new ways in which heritage can be managed and presented.

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Aimee Hinds
Articles, Peer Reviewed

The polychromy of classical sculpture has been systematically suppressed in Western art since the Renaissance resulting in an artificial whiteness that fits within a tradition of presenting false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that codes all idealised bodies as white, young, and hetero-normative. Using an intersectional framework to consider the significance of class, gender and race, the author analyses receptions of the Farnese Hercules and explores why (lack of) colour has been weaponised as a way for Western culture to claim an inheritance from the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how this is perpetuated in modern classical reception.

Garlands for Gods in Southeast India

Garlands for Gods in Southeast India

Leah Comeau
Photo Essays, Peer Reviewed

This is a study of flowers and garlands in Tamil South India as they travel through temples and markets and are grown, sold, and bought by a variety of communities. Various threads of sensory engagements, including colors, fragrances, and the clamor of the market and festive temple grounds, all accumulate into a sense of community aesthetics and sensational forms, from which a devotee might draw to participate.

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Jessica Hughes
Articles

An essay on the details and aesthetic significance of a votive offering that artist Yves Klein made to St. Rita of Cascia. While art has always played an ineliminable role in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it seems that Klein was particularly sensitive to the entanglement of votive offering, economic sacrifice, and the experiential dimensions of ritual. In many of Klein's works, it would seem that the subsumption of art into religion has been inverted.