How do you measure...

…the value of value?

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The award-winning musical Broadway show (and later-made movie), RENT, greatly depends on the concept of value to portray its story and set its theme. RENT contains a deeply moving storyline by touching on sensitive and taboo subjects such as AIDS, gay relationships and drug addiction. With such powerful subjects, the role that value – the amounts of lightness and darkness – plays in the performance/movie are essential to highlighting RENT’s thematic moments. For example, in the opening scene, the actors/actresses are situated in a line on a darkened stage, with each character illuminated in his/her own individual ray of spotlight. It is during this scene when the song, “Seasons of Love” is sung, and the question, “How do you measure, a year in a life?” is raised.

The value contrast in this particular scene stirs up a sense of sincere humanity – with all focus and emphasis placed on the characters who sing about how life is fragile and how a person is never guaranteed to live through another day. The scene is especially powerfully moving when there is a blackout – when all lights are extinguished onstage – at the end of the song.

The art of quilting.

Although quilts are often associated with adorning the walls of family’s homes or lying neatly folded at the foot of people’s beds, the fabricating of quilts actually has a deeper history that is often overlooked. In the Nelson Gallery on U.C. Davis’ campus, the African American Quilts (the Sandra McPherson Collection and the Avis C. Robinson Collection) exhibit is currently on display. Here, viewers can stroll through the room and view the variety of quilts that all hold their own unique stories behind their creations. Back during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African American women worked double shifts – plowing in the fields during the day, and making quilts for their families at night. Needlework, such as quilting, was the main way for African American women to express themselves aesthetically at the time. This history alone emphasizes the significance that lies within the stitches of quilting masterpieces, such as those on display in the Nelson Gallery, or even the quilts that do currently adorn living room walls and people’s beds.

Since new fabric was not readily accessible during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African American women would use old pieces of clothing, bedding and flour sacks to make their quilts. One of the quilts featured in the Nelson Gallery portrayed this concept of using scraps for quilting. In the piece titled, “Annie’s Blue Jeans” [photo below], the quilt consisted of scraps of old blue jeans, tapestry fabric, cotton fabric, and hand-dyed cotton corduroy.

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Although “Annie’s Blue Jeans” was actually made in 2007, the use of scraps allowed it to take on the appearance of the quilting style from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also, the quilt’s sharp, straightforward and blunt rhythm is seen through the pattern of squares within more squares, and the quilt’s blue hued theme added to its overall cold appearance. Similar to the rhythm and pattern of a bulls-eye target, this quilt’s layout draws the viewer from the outside edges, straight into the center.

Unlike the design of “Annie’s Blue Jeans,” the pattern and rhythm found in another particular quilt from the gallery was quite different. In Rosa Ella Kincaid’s quilt [photo below], which lacked a title, there was not a pattern and rhythm that were as straightforward and obvious as the pattern and rhythm found in “Annie’s Blue Jeans.”

(Personal photo)

The rhythm in Kincaid’s quilt was less clear, but there were still obvious patterns in the repetition of figures on the quilt. By relying on gestalt principles, viewers can make out the repeating figures that resemble women in bonnets, cottages and grass fields. Also, the use of pink and beige color tones gave the quilt a warm appeal. Kincaid was born in 1886, meaning that this quilt was made during the twentieth century. Again, in contrast to “Annie’s Blue Jeans,” Kincaid’s quilt was not designed in the same organized fashion.

According to the words of Sigmund Freud...

Imagine walking down the sidewalk on your typical morning route to work. The average chalk drawings of elementary school students – smiley faces, butterflies and rainbows – are spotted along the ground. However, suddenly, out of nowhere, a gigantic hole is discovered in the sidewalk – a hole that seems to drop straight down into another world.

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Peering down into the hole in the sidewalk through the bird’s-eye view allows the new world below to be seen from a perspective with great depth. However, after peering even closer, the realization hits that this hole in the sidewalk is just a mere chalk drawing – drawn with the technique of spacial illusion.

While on the topic of illusion, design can also incorporate the illusion of motion into works of art. Why else would people continue to pay a rip-off fee to use photo booths at carnivals and amusement parks? Photo booths offer customers what normal cameras cannot: the mystifying illusion of multiple images.

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As seen in the multiple images set of American socialite, Edie Sedgwick [see image above], a sense of movement is captured when the multiple images of her different facial expressions are placed together. The movement is captured like the movement from an old-fashioned flipbook as viewers scan from one image to the next.

Like the illusion of space, the illusion of movement may be a natural sensation for people to experience because it helps make perceiving design in creative and more appealing ways. As psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, once stated, “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”