Friday, December 19, 2008

Stuff We Found While Weeding

Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight, Huston Paschal, Linda Johnson Dougherty, co-curators. The North Carolina Museum of Flight celebrated the Centennial of Flight in 2003 by mounting an exhibition of artwork related, sometimes tangentially, to flight. Very creative entries include Lockheed Lounge (a chaise lounge made from sheet aluminum and rivets), the Flight Research series (photos of a woman skydiving in a wedding dress) and Give Me Wings (a bright yellow biplane rocking chair). And there is some silly stuff as well. My favorite non-silly work is John Schabel’s series of photos of airline passengers taken outside of the plane, their faces framed by the windows they sleep beside and gaze out of.

Working Women: an Appealing Look at the Appalling Uses and Abuses of the Feminine Form, Jessica Strang. Okay, I am familiar with the Caryatids in Athens and that lippy Marilyn couch, but most of the stuff in this book is new to me (thank goodness). Some of it really is appalling, some of it is charmingly nostalgic, and the rest is weirdly fascinating in a what-were-they-thinking kind of way.

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