Summer SAVY 2017, Session 3/Day 4- Truth vs. Perception (Rising 6th/7th)
Today was all about art! To me, personal interpretations of art are a great way to discuss how one perceive the work in front of them. So I started students off with a question: what counts as art? What qualifications must something have to be considered art? And who gets to decide? As you can imagine, opinions and perceptions differed greatly, and we had a lively debate about whether one could just merely call anything art if that’s how they perceived it.
We viewed two slide shows of things commonly considered art: one of everyday objects that are widely interpreted as artistic (form over function) from the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, George Ohr, and Mark Menhjivar; and the other featuring some landmark pieces of Modernist and Postmodernist art (often considered ‘difficult’ to interpret). We used the visual analysis wheel, a relative of literary analysis wheel, in order to familiarize ourselves with artistic terminology as well as to gauge their personal reactions to the works.
This was all in preparation to our trip to the Fine Arts Gallery at Vanderbilt. https://as.vanderbilt.edu/gallery/. The students were tasked with finding a piece of art that spoke to them somehow that they could then turn into an art project. I wanted to students find a work they could ‘narrate’ from a different point of view. We spent the rest of the afternoon working on their art project.
We finished the day by viewing and discussing a TEDTalk by Beau Lotto entitled, “Optical Illusions Show Us How to See.” It’s about how the brain process colors within various contexts, alternating our perception of what we’re actually seeing.
Dr. Anderson
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