Museum Visit

THE ALTERNATIVE LIMB PROJECT

SOPHIE DE OLIVEIRA BARATA

 

The project is one where an artist decorates and designs custom prosthetics for amputees. This allows for the artist and the amputee to reimagine their prosthetics and give it an additional function of as a beauty accessory.

Upon first glance I didn’t think much of the artwork as it just felt like an artist wanted a new and unconventional medium to explore with and therefore she ended up decorating prosthetics. I initially felt like her aim was to raise awareness about amputees and be able to bring beauty onto an object that would otherwise be considered unsightly. Prosthetics are not things that people usually would want to look at and therefore bringing in an aspect of beauty to them was admirable of the artists.

On retrospect the project actually does more than I thought it did. It also allows for a person to be able to express themselves or show their identity through their prosthetics, literally allowing their body to be their canvas without having the issue of permanence as it is with tattoos. The added beauty that this project can provide for amputees would actually have so many more implications for them than just a beauty accessory.

IMPROVISED EMPATHETIC DEVICE I.E.D

S.W.A.M.P (MATT KENYON I DOUG EASTERLY)

This project is one of an attachable device to someone’s arm that draws the blood of the wearer whenever an american soldier dies in the war in Iraq. The name and certain other details about the deceased soldier will also appear on the device itself.

I feel that this work really speaks to me as deaths sometimes really do feel like just another statistic; people are unable to feel real pain or see the suffering that comes with each death because they can come in the form of pain in the loved ones of the deceased and other sources that don’t directly come from the demise of the person himself. At the end of the day, most of the pain is dismissed in the representation of the person’s death in a statistic, and a lot of that pain is forgotten.

This project speaks to me because it gives a physical representation, albeit a toned down one, of the pain and loss that people feel when it comes to losing a loved one in a war. It gives the audience or wearer a more direct experience of pain, and in a way injects immediacy and more empathy into the wearer regarding this person’s death. You may not know who the person who died is personally, but you now know his name, time of death, and a fraction of the pain that comes along with his passing.