One of Burtynsky’s projects that made an impression on me is his Salt Pan project. The way he captures the salt pans causes the audience to perceive it as abstract. Specifically, the portrayal of the water drainage system. The diagonal and uniformed lines of the drainage system allow the audience’s eyes to follow the path. However, the path doesn’t lead anywhere new, it goes right back to where it started. Furthermore, the space that surrounds the salt pans leads the audience to focus on just the salt pan and nothing else. With the scaling and proportional of the salt pans, the pans seem so insignificant and small. However, the salt pans are the main source of life for that society, which is noted by the tire tracks. Furthermore, the dependence
On Wednesday, February 15th, I was able to have the opportunity to listen to Andrew Lipman. Andrew Lipman is the author of The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast. In the novel, he explained the life of Native Americans living in New England and on the coast of Long Island. During this time, most individuals relied on trading natural resources. In order for profit for the resources, the colonists and Native Americans used wampum. Wampum was used as a sacred gift in Native American culture as a peace offering, funerals and marriages. Colonialists had an advantage towards using wampum. They used beads as a commodity for furs. Native Americans relied on canoes for transportation. Canoes can hold up to fifty people.
Nature has a powerful way of portraying good vs. bad, which parallels to the same concept intertwined with human nature. In the story “Greasy Lake” by T. Coraghessan Boyle, the author portrays this through the use of a lake by demonstrating its significance and relationship to the characters. At one time, the Greasy Lake was something of beauty and cleanliness, but then came to be the exact opposite. Through his writing, Boyle demonstrates how the setting can be a direct reflection of the characters and the experiences they encounter.
In society we are surrounded by images, immersed in a visual world with symbols and meaning created through traditional literary devices, but augmented with the influence of graphics, words, positioning and colour. The images of Peter Goldsworthy’s novel, Maestro (1989) move within these diameters and in many ways the visions of Ivan Sen’s film Beneath Clouds (2002) linger in the same way. Both these texts explore themes of appearance versus reality and influence of setting, by evoking emotion in the responder through their distinctively visual elements.
Desert Solitaire aims to draw attention to the activities of a man voluntarily isolated in nature. It seeks to identify the strife that Abbey faces with modern day human’s treatment of his nature. As such, the argument that Abbey poses in one his earlier chapters Rocks is, that the Modern Day man is destructive and cannot be trusted to preserve nature as is.
This tendency is certainly comparable, if not a direct outgrowth of the idea of site-specificity by 20th century movements such as Conceptualism, Minimalism, and Land Art. The idea behind site-specificity is both crafting a piece and selecting a set place where the piece will be displayed (either permanently or temporarily), in such a way that the piece either cannot be displayed elsewhere or that the piece will have its meaning significantly altered if moved. Perhaps the most famous version of this is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a fifteen hundred foot long and fifteen foot wide spiraling pathway constructed over a period of months that juts into the Great Salt Lake. To even reach Spiral Jetty, one must travel a long way along the shore of Lake, as it is far away from any main road or town. Furthermore, Smithson did not just choose a random, remote location along the shore, but painstakingly chose the best spot for the longevity of the piece, avoiding soft muds while allowing for an easy approach from the beach. Finally, Smithson holds that the piece echoes the chemistry and geology of its location. In his written accompaniment to the piece also titled
The inclusion of props and other physical objects in a play or novel creates a better understanding of the social interactions between characters, society, and self. In the play The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov, and within the book A Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the inclusion of physical objects provokes a strong understanding to the motives behind a change in society, and the underlying motives to a characters' action. Food is used as a prop in The Cherry Orchard to provide details that help develop characters' actions. The changes in A Hundred Years of Solitude are driven by specific technological introductions. In A Hundred Years of Solitude characters' ambitions are described by their interest in technology, and specifically of the physical objects that they create and work with. The ability for physical objects to provide sociological insight is shared between The Cherry Orchard and A Hundred Years of Solitude despite different cultures, time periods, and formats of the literary work.
The main way M. Night. Shyamalan conveys the theme is by symbolism. Shyamalan uses symbolism all throughout the movie. He starts by using the crop circles. Within the first 10 minutes of the movie, Graham finds that parts of his corn field has been laid down in circles, and then you see other people whose crops were recently laid down. Although Graham thinks
Abstract Expressionists were all about massive scale. Going for emotional impact, many Abstract Expressionists used dramatic scale to draw viewers into their paintings, as if they were environments. Barnett Newman, for instance, gave explicit instructions for the distance viewers should stand away from his large scale paintings. In so doing, Newman created an experience that could not be taken in all at
In his essay Calypso Borealis, John Muir mainly uses diction while using some examples of imagery to express his relationship with nature. When describing his journey to find the Calypso Borealis Muir writes, “…holding a general though very crooked course… struggling through tangled drooping branches and over and under broad heaps of fallen trees.” Using specific descriptions of his surroundings helps the reader
This film captures this class distinction without subduing the atmosphere through the use of a variety of cinematic devices. “A good film is not a bag of cinematic devices but the embodiment, through devices, of a vision, an underlying theme” (Barnett, 274). The audience can see this theme of the realities of the oppression, poverty and despair of this time period through the use of the things mentioned, but also through the character development that is driven by the character’s hopelessness. Each of the characters associated with the lower class is motivated by the conditions, which are viewed through the cinematic devices mentioned above: color, spherical lenses, long shots, and high angle shots. Sources Cited:.
In the case of the Grand Canyon, once it became a national park, all people experience is under “approved circumstances”, leading the viewer to the dispense of the media. Once a viewer “sovereignty” is lost, he renders his “satisfaction by the degree to which the Canyon conforms to the preformed complex.” Similarly, modern man is so entranced by the bodiless media that society is at a loss. Once Percy starts to dwell with society, one realizes this is not simply an idea about how to see things, but a critique of the lack of true experiences. Despite his concern, he proposes a solution. He gives the account of a biology student with a dogfish, but being too preoccupied by his coursework, he does not really see it; and much in the same way, an English student looses the connection with a Shakespeare sonnet. The problem lies in that both the English student and biology student don't know they are at a loss, and the only way to fully regain back their sovereignty is that unexpectedly “poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissection boards”. Percy implies that the only way to experience the “it” factor of an object is through having an unabridged, intimate relation with that one tries
Although his illustrations are incredibly precise and thought provoking they still maintain a sense of ambiguity in the fact that the people are never given a sense of identity. A stereotypical outline of the figure is often used in a grayscale or black and white depiction and it leads the viewer to question whether the person is male, female, old, young, or of a different race. This is successful in portraying the fact that we all operate according to the same basic functions but this often leaves the work feeling emotionless and rather mechanical. We know now that this is simply not true, we are very much reliant on emotions to carry out certain biological processes within the brain and stray quiet far from the rigidity of me...
The author, to entirely convey Jonas’s view of the world in his imagination and the origin of his strong desires, employs vivid, colorful, extensive descriptions of the beauty and horror instigated by nature and freedom. A few of the exemplary integrations of imagery, which paint lush mental images, as written by Lois Lowry, include, “Looking through the front window, he had seen no people: none of the busy afternoon crew of Street Cleaners, Landscape Workers, and Food Delivery people who usually populated the community at that time of day. He saw only the abandoned bikes here and there on their sides; an upturned wheel on one was still revolving slowly.” (p.15), “Soon there were many birds along the way, soaring overhead, calling. They saw deer; and once, beside the road, looking at them curious and unafraid, a small reddish brown creature with a thick tail, whose name Jonas did not know. He slowed the bike and they stared at one another until the creature turned away and disappeared into the woods.” (p.230), “…banquets with huge roasted meats; birthday parties with thick-frosted cakes; and lush fruits picked and eaten, sun-warmed and dripping, from trees.” (p.232). Through such instances of imagery, the author is able to convey and inspire the reader through vivid, emotion-evoking mental
The poem starts off with a solid use of personification to help the reader follow the story being told by the use of figurative language. The same poem by Richard, The City Is So Big, he uses personification to help give the reader an even better glimpse of what is happening, later on in the poem, it says “I have seen machines eating houses”. By using the personification in the poem, it gives the reader a strong sense of imagery and it gives us a good mental picture of what is happening in the
In her opening chapter, Jones introduces the distinctive voices of her five seemingly unrelated protagonists, each observing and perceiving their environment—that of Sydney’s Circular Quay—in very different ways. Ellie is shown to be creative, commenting that the Opera House is ‘poised in a kind of alertness to acoustical meaning’ (52); Pei Xing focuses on familiarity and order, calling the same edifice ‘a fixture she [relies] on’ ‘like porcelain bowls, stacked’ (52); while for James it is a threat, with ‘maws open to the sky in a perpetual devouring’ (53), evidencing his negative state of mind. The accumulation of different characters’ varying mental metaphors and images regarding the same physical construct intrigued me, demonstrating the uniqueness of each individual’s mind, and prompting me to explore this theme in my