"Friday Night Lights"

Jacked these two pictures from a party-mixer facebook event Friday Night Lights co-sponsored by Yale-Harvard CSA's. Since these two schools are rich like bad ass, admission is FREE. But then again, so far i've seen 120 confirmed guests. Really making me wonder how much money and space they would need to accommodate this many people.







Not really sure which one I like better. Inclined to say the second though, maybe because of the free black space that gives room to breathe and contemplative air to the overall tone.

What art style is this?

This morning on the way to my Chinese art class I walked past the senior honours thesis exhibition for visual art concentrators and was struck by one student's work (Lauren Khoo). The title is Disconsolate and the medium used is cibachrome and acrylic. It's picture of a woman whose only visible part of her face perched on the bathtub. It is suggested that she's either dead or severely injured since there's blood running down from her mouth. One arm sticks out and there is this glamourous diamond bracelet on the wrist. On the floor lies her handbag and what I take to be a scarf. And that's it. I'm so drawn to this piece and have made it a point to revisit it for more than three times already. While other students' works showcase somewhat abstract paintings on various kinds of materials, Khoo's is the only one that uses photography as a medium. I will take a picture and put it up if I can. I'm totally mesmerised.

And that led me to thinking in retrospect about my obsession with glamour shots, cryptic contemporary photography that suggests female sexuality and eroticism, and today's female celebrities (Eva Longoria, Paris Hilton, etc) who embody such qualities. It's never outright sexual or an in-your-face sexiness or cheap Playboy. Rather, it's more often than not simply suggested, subtle, yet exuberantly pretentious. Not that I've never thought about this before, but I certainly have never fleshed this thought out in such a concrete, well-founded manner. Strangely enough, when it comes to design, on the one hand I'm a big fan of minimalism, simplicity, sparkling glass, and subdued elegance in black&white (true style never shouts kind of philosophy), but the other hand, this glam style with a hint of rococo, Arabesque, and Victorian vintage is just mesmerising to look at. Interesting indeed.

Examples include but are not limited to the pictures below, with the first one hitting the hugest nail on the head:

One thing senior year can do to you is...

Random course selection, like this:

The politics of European democracies (polisci)
Early 19th century European art (art history)
Asian American pop culture (american civilizations)
The Fiction of Relationship (comp lit)
Figures de l'étranger dans la littérature française (um, french?)






Whee.

I did it.

At least I lived up to the expectations. Go me.