Reading Comprehension 7

The Female Indian was a sculptural piece of art done in 2006 by Sam Durant. This sculpture is an example of some of the ideas that we have covered in this unit of exploration. Durant who is a mixed media artist often uses his different resources and media to help him tie his work into social, cultural, and political aspects of current subjects in a sculptural expression. This can be compared to the movements in design during the explorations unit, because buildings that were built during this time began to use the resources that were already available in order to create new concepts. In Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye he took materials that had been used for years and incorporated them into an idea of dematerialize a building. Just as Durant left the hands and area below the torso unfinished Le Corbusier created a void beneath the Villa as if it were floating above the ground. Durant's work often deals with the conflicts between differing classes, cultures and value systems. This is similar to Le Corbusier’s thoughts and challenges that he issued to designers, challenging them to change their way of social thinking, which could be summed up by saying “Architecture or Revolution.” (Roth 530)
Another image that seemed to correspond to the explorations unit was the Philip Pearlstein painting two female nudes on green sofa. This is reflective of the sculpted modernism movement in the twentieth century. “ Glass heated office boxes became sculpted into singular and unique forms” (Roth 572) This movement was intended to shift the idea of modernism from cube like structures to more open and fluid like shapes. I felt that these two were similar because like the designers who began to experiment with change in this movement, Pearlstein began to experiment and with his paintings in the twentieth century emphasizing on the curves and exploring the mass of the human body.