Week 7 — Art Idea Essay — The Art of Place
Ashley Brach
Art 100
Professor Glenn
10 October 2020
The Art of Place
Place is where we go and create memories and moments that are very impactful in an individual’s life. Much of where we go, stay, and experience can create cultures because maybe certain spots such as churches are places that many go to worship their god and engage in different traditions that their specific religion requires. Also, many people who just start going to church or other spots of religious activities may have inspired people to become a part of that as well so they will continuously go to the place where they can experience their beliefs. Place can also express someone’s identity, values, and opportunities because all of where you live can guide you down a certain path or direction. For example, if my house was in a good neighborhood with schools that gave a great education, the more likely they will have a more successful, happy, and nurturing life as well as could have more opportunities than someone who grew up in a house with poverty, depression, and a lack of education. Place is a very important factor in a person’s life because it can shape your future.
Amelia Bauer is an artist whose work shows “a series of discrete investigations into our cultural conceptions of the natural world” (Glimmerglass Film Days). A lot of her work is done with looking at the world through a lens of mythology and history of aesthetic and transitional landscapes. She makes photographs and sculptures of American culture and its endeavors. She uses place “to create spaces that exist somewhere between our fears of the uncultivated wild and our romanticism of the “virgin” landscape”(Glimmerglass Film Days). This is useful to know because place doesn’t have to be just buildings and structures, but could be a certain spot in nature that makes us change our perspectives and identities in our life. Katharine Kreisher is another artist whose digital art expresses her identity and all the positive and negative impacts on the sense of self. She has work of a gazebo over the waters in Sharon Springs, New York that she describes the smell as the underworld. She stated that the place “as a place of ritual, cleansing, healing and transformation, a place suited for my itinerant journeys into unconscious narratives, reworkings of memories and myths” (Glimmerglass Film Days). This information is useful because she describes the places with human characteristics and that these places we go to are like humans as well. She also talks about the importance of these places and how places can change us. A sociologist, named Robertson, views place is “we are who we are and we behave the way we do because we happen to live in a particular society at a particular point in space and time” (Berger). This also shows how place as society or surroundings can change our perspectives and behavior towards many things.
Another form of place can exist in school and work because these are public places and that provides a physical environment and can shape a person’s behavior, intelligence, perspective, and our social domain in our lives. Our life takes place in many places and surroundings. Even if it’s not a physical place, an individual’s state of mind can move to different places depending on what has affected them. Places can be made better if everyone helped out those who couldn’t get a good level of education because the school was not in the right neighborhood or had bad teachers and also we need to improve others behaviors and health by helping those go to a different mental place in their life. Places can adapt to Corona and other viruses by knowing where you can go and limiting access to many places that the general public go to on a daily basis. So, it is changing people’s traditions and routines from what they are used to and this can show how meaningful those places they can’t go to anymore are. Now, generation z and millennials in the 21st century physically have many more places to go to and experience to make them shape their behaviors and perspectives in many different ways. Mentally, schools have created a place of bad mental health resulting in high levels of anxiety and depression. School and work life are very different from that of the baby boomers. The levels of mental health were decreased by a lot and there was a lot less to go to and so they created memorable places wherever they could find it. Also, places they would go to would be more in nature or outside more whereas this new generation has a lot to do with technology and staying in doors. So, the places they endure in their lives are very different which show why the generations have different perspectives, views, and experiences in life.
Place is a society or landmark that shapes a person’s behavior, personality, perspective, success, and identity in life. I hope later on we will have more variations of what place is and see what else shapes a person. I think a place is as much internal as it is external. America in 2024 will have many more buildings and technological finding whether it be more modern buildings or virtual buildings. In 2025, I believe there will be the same thing, but I think our mental place will have drastically changed, for the good or bad I don’t know yet because that all depends on how we act upon the issue now. To navigate a place during a pandemic isolation is to know what places you can go to and how to adapt to a certain place, internally and externally, to live a good and healthy life. After my graduation, I would hope I will be in a good place of being successful in finding a career and hope I get to experience everything I want to in life.
Works Cited
N/A. “PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES: FIVE ARTISTS’ SENSE OF PLACE, COMPANION EXHIBITION AT THE SMITHY.” Glimmerglass Film Days, n.d., https://www.glimmerglassfilmdays.org/new-gallery-56.
Berger, Peter. “The Sociological Perspective.” Geneso, n.d., https://www.geneseo.edu/sociology/about.
